Gravelight (16 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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Where was Luned? He couldn't remember whether she was supposed to be here or not—or what he'd said to her yesterday. Probably something ghastly—if there was one virtue he could claim, it was consistency.
He risked a more athletic move, and was rewarded with pain that raced like summer lightning across his nerves. Strained muscles—from the fall yesterday, from the car crash the day before. Wycherly grinned in triumph, pleased to have remembered that much. He wasn't seriously injured, only stiff. If he was careful, he could move without causing himself too much pain. And he needed to see if the ankle—he remembered that too—would bear his weight.
He threw back the covers and looked down. His ankle was the size of a young cantaloupe and mottled with greenish bruises.
He wasn't sure he could walk on that after all.
This is just … jolly,
Wycherly thought to himself, irritated past emotion. Alone, trapped, unable to move …
It might not be as bad as it looked.
He thought longingly of a bath, hot water up to his neck and fresh clean clothes. Fat chance of that here in this rural retreat. Wycherly sighed. He wasn't sure why coming to stay here had seemed like such a good idea.
Because you're drinking yourself to death. Because you
just smashed up yet another car-without insurance—while your license was suspended. Because you need to know …
What? Wycherly shook his head. Whatever answers he thought he needed, they certainly weren't to be found here. There wasn't anything in Morton's Fork except poverty, disease, and
nothing
.
Other than the Addams Family Hotel up there on the hill.
The burnt-out shell of Wildwood Sanatorium—so like present company—was an oddity in an otherwise ordinary area, and Wycherly welcomed the thought of anything that might distract him. He felt as if someone had inserted sand beneath his skin, like the rhinoceros in Kipling's “Just So” story. Soon, if he were unlucky, it wouldn't be sand, but bugs—hallucinations of bugs in his skin, in his clothes, crawling all over the walls—
With effort, Wycherly wrenched his mind away from that unpleasant forecast. It didn't have to happen. Not if he was careful, and prudent. He could start by getting out of bed.
Carefully, wincing and snarling at every motion, Wycherly levered himself upright. He rested his good foot on the floor and then, grabbing the bedframe to steady himself, began to put weight on the bad foot.
No good. Wycherly fell back to the bed, panting. It wouldn't support him. But maybe if he strapped it back up again …
“Hello?”
It wasn't Luned. He leaned forward and through the open bedroom door he could see Sinah step through the unlocked front door. She was wearing shorts and a bright sleeveless blouse, and her soft brown hair was pulled back under a scarf, California-style. The round, tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses she wore made her look like an archetypal Hollywood actress.
No, not Hollywood … Broadway. Recognition was very nearly a tangible weight in his mind.
“Wycherly?” Sinah called again.
The moment she stepped over the threshold Sinah felt as though she'd slipped back in time fifty years. The only stove was a big, black, potbellied monster and the refrigerator looked like something out of an old movie. Its door was hanging open, and there didn't seem to be anything inside but beer. Automatically, Sinah walked over and closed it. The cabin interior was dim, stiflingly hot; she could feel Wycherly's presence, a faint painful turmoil.
“Here,” Wycherly's voice called.
Sinah turned and walked into the bedroom, approaching Wycherly with less reluctance than she'd felt yesterday. Any distraction, however unpleasant, was better than sitting and probing her own mind for the traces of Athanais de Lyon.
The bedroom was tiny, furnished in early Sears-Roebuck. An ornate brass bed dominated the room. Wycherly was sitting on the edge of the bed, a fold of sheet thrown across his midsection. Sunburn striped his face and body in random splotches, angry and painful-looking. He stared warily. She felt a sense of failure strong enough to choke her, a paralyzing inadequacy; his reality beat against her mind insistently, drowning out the presence of Athanais de Lyon.
“I came to see how you're doing,” Sinah said. Bracing herself, she walked into the proximity that would allow her to feel not only Wycherly's emotions, but his thoughts.
Anger.
stupid cow coming back here to meddle
Fear.
don't let her see me like this
Hatred.
should have expected it they always do
The only thing that would let him function effectively with another person was the one thing he was denying himself. Alcohol.
The empathy that was her curse and her gift reached out to him. Better than anyone else on earth, Sinah understood exactly how he felt.
“I'm doing just fine,” Wycherly said. There was a pause; Sinah watched as he seemed to realize that something more seemed to be needed. “It wasn't as bad as I'd thought.”
“I see,” Sinah said, taking another step forward. “Can you stand on it?”
Wycherly glared, unwittingly providing her with the answer. He'd already tried and it hadn't worked out.
“Well, it looks like I showed up just in time,” Sinah said, forcing a brightness she did not feel. “I brought some things you might need; Epsom salts, liniment—”
“Give me my clothes.” Wycherly's voice was a harsh, peremptory bark. Sinah stopped.
“Do you treat all your good Samaritans this way?” she snapped back.
“It depends on what's in it for you,” Wycherly said sullenly.
Sinah laughed shortly. “It must be your body, since it can't be your sweet temper. Look, let's call it a truce, okay? You need help, and I'm willing to donate a few hours to the cause. And after that, I don't care what happens to you.”
“Yeah. No one does.” The words came out with an edge of self-pity that she could feel he hadn't intended.
“Look. I'm sorry, okay? I'm tired and everything hurts, and besides that, it's damned inconvenient. I just wish I—” Wycherly sighed harshly. “Look, could you get me my clothes? They're on the floor somewhere.”
They were, in fact, on the floor at the end of the bed. Sinah picked up the ripped and filthy items with distaste.
“These?”
“They're what there is. My luggage was delayed.”
“There's a clean shirt in the other room,” Sinah said, tossing him the pants. She went back out into the other room.
The shirt was right where she'd seen it—nice enough once, but now mended with careful rows of stitching. Apparently Mr. Musgrave was hard on his clothes. She went back out to the Jeep for her supplies—and his other shoe. Wycherly's mind-voice faded until it was only a faint mutter in the background, like an oncoming storm.
Her presence here this early in the morning couldn't really be chalked up to altruism. Like a bad movie playing in a constant loop just below the surface of Sinah's mind, Athanais de Lyon was
there
, and three centuries had not
dimmed her avarice—or her malice. Though her enemies were long since dust in their graves, Athanais still wanted revenge.
And Sinah would be her instrument.
No
… Sinah pressed clammy hands to her temples and closed her eyes tightly, leaning against the Jeep.
It had taken her nearly a year to recoup her fortunes once she'd reached the Maryland Colony and longer to find a spoiled priest that she could bend to her will—one who knew the local dialects and had connections to the savages in the West … .
A vision of these mountains—not as they were, but as they had been when only the deer and the Tutelo roamed these hills—burned behind her eyes.
“Stop it,” Sinah said aloud.
I'm me! I'm ME!
And if she wasn't, who was she?
Sinah drew a ragged breath. Was this what happened to all her kind eventually? Was it what had happened to her mother? Sinah closed her eyes tightly, fighting back tears. When you acknowledged that you needed help, help was supposed to arrive. But if she could not find help in Morton's Fork, she did not know where it could be found.
Maybe nowhere.
Meanwhile, the thought of being alone was intolerable. She needed other minds, other thoughts to drown this usurper—and like it or not, Wycherly Musgrave was the only person she could get.
CRUEL AS THE GRAVE
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the
vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the
secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and
keeps their fallen day about her …
—WALTER PATER
WHEN SINAH CAME BACK INSIDE, WYCHERLY HAD HIS pants on and had made it out to the main room, clutching at a chair.
“Well, you're stubborn, aren't you?” Sinah asked, smiling to take any sting out of her words. His pain and craving beat at the edge of her senses like heavy surf.
“So I've been told,” Wycherly drawled. He lowered himself to a chair and began putting on his shirt.
“I know who you are, you know. I saw you in New York, in this little off-Broadway thing. You were playing a woman—” Wycherly pushed his hair back out of his face with both hands, leaving the shirt unbuttoned. “Don't remember the name—but you were wearing this sleeveless pink sundress thing—”
A ridiculous urge to laugh bubbled up in Sinah's chest. There was no point in being irritated when people recognized her—not if she'd chosen to work in a field where notoriety was both the goal and the fate of those who
worked there. But Wycherly Musgrave was the last person she'd have pegged for a fan.
“That's Adrienne. You saw
Zero Sum Game.
I'm surprised you remember—it closed more than a year and a half ago,” Sinah said kindly. “The movie's coming out this December.”
“I remember you,” Wycherly repeated. He looked away, as if he'd embarrassed himself. “Anyway, you said you were an actress yesterday.”
“So I did,” Sinah agreed blandly. “And what brings you to Morton's Fork, Mr. Musgrave?”
She already knew the answer—as well as he did, anyway, which wasn't very well at all—but it was the sort of oblivious social question that people who weren't freaks asked each other, whether they wanted to know the answers or not.
“I thought it would be quiet,” he said, and beneath his words, the thought: “
I came to Casablanca for the waters
.”
She smiled—at the unspoken answer, not the one she was supposed to have heard. “If you'd ended up in that river you'd have had a bit more quiet than you cared for,” she said.
Not to mention water.
Wycherly smiled a twisted smile and didn't answer. But he didn't have to. The words came to her mind as clearly as if he'd spoken them:
And how do you know I wouldn't care for it?
“Are you sure you're all right here alone?” Sinah blurted out.
Wycherly turned in his seat and stared at her, his pale eyes a wolf-yellow in the dim light. Under the impetus of Wycherly's mind, Sinah saw herself as he saw her: potential threat. Not even prey—she could deal with that—but as something that had no particular value to his life … yet might still cause him trouble.
“And you are?” he said, and meant:
Who the hell do you think you are, Little Miss Movie Star? Think you're going
to star in some live-action roleplaying
Beverly Hillbillies
manqué at my expense?
“No,” Sinah protested, answering the thought and not the words. “I just … need help.”
The words were dragged from her reluctantly, but Wycherly Musgrave would respond to—would understand—nothing other than self-interest.
“That's why I came here today.”
Instantly everything changed, though Sinah wasn't entirely sure why. Anger and impatience vanished from Wycherly's mind as thoroughly as if it were a blackboard that had been wiped clean, to be replaced by a sense of isolation so immense that it could never be challenged. She'd said something wrong—her, Sinah Dellon, the woman who always knew the right thing to say.
“What seems to be the problem?” Wycherly asked easily.
I don't know
. Sinah sat down on the other chair, and found that she was wringing her hands together, gripping them so tightly that they ached. She didn't want to explain—and how could she, without opening the door to an entire farrago of nonsense?
Haunted? Telepathic? Those things belonged to big-budget summer movies, not to real life.
“Are you being stalked?” Wycherly asked, something like sympathy in his voice.
“No!” It was such an unexpected question—though obvious, all things considered—that her response was more vehement than she'd intended.
“I mean—”
“Never mind. If you actually want to make a soak you're going to have to heat water, you're going to have to fire up that stove. I can show you how,” he said. Any other subject was apparently closed for the moment.
With Wycherly supervising, Sinah filled the stove from the wood box and lit the kindling. It was already stuffy in the small cabin; the added heat would make the place a sweatbox.
“I was born here,” Sinah found herself saying as she
worked, as casually as if she spoke to a wild animal that could not understand. “Somewhere in Morton's Fork. On the certificate it says ‘Home Birth, Morton's Fork, Lyonesse County.' So I came back here when I could.”
Faint flicker of interest from the mind of the man behind her.
She located a pot in the cupboard, set it on the stove, and filled it from one of the buckets of water that sat beside the stove.
“My mother was dead—she'd died when I was born. I grew up in a foster home. My foster parents weren't particularly fond of me. I don't blame them; they had their reasons. I knew where I'd come from, of course—I found this place on a survey map at the library when I was fourteen. I'd always dreamed of coming back here, finding any relatives I had left, but I wanted to do it in style. Now, well, you said you knew who I am. The whole world knows that things are going pretty well for me.”
“So why the sob story?” Wycherly asked. It was brutal, but she'd expected it from him. The rich were wary of sob stories and setups, and Wycherly Musgrave, no matter how abused, was a child of privilege.
For a moment her visions and nightmares since she'd come home blazed across her thoughts like summer lightning. She shook her head, denying them. There was no smoke, no fire—no dead witch in her dreams.
“As I said, I expected to find relatives in Morton's Fork,” Sinah said evenly. “You know how these mountain communities are—large families and close-knit. Even if some people move away, all of them don't. And I needed information about my bloodline. But—”
Abruptly there was a lump in her throat. She'd had several months to get used to this; she didn't expect it still to hurt as much as it did.
“There's been a problem,” Sinah said in a strangled whisper. “No one here will admit my mother ever existed. As soon as they found out I was her daughter, they shut me out. Why? What have I done? What did
she
do?”
Witch
—
devil child
—
monster
—
Sinah closed her mouth abruptly.
“Why don't you see if you can find the coffee?” Wycherly said, just as if she were not coming to pieces before his eyes.
As Sinah hunted through his cupboards—Wycherly had no idea where the coffee was or how to make it—he mulled over her story.
It didn't add up.
Sinah Dellon was a Broadway gypsy gone Hollywood. She wasn't pretty, with that feral fox-face meant to be seen through a camera lens or over footlights, but she was attractive in the way a clean, healthy, unpainted young woman could be, with an animal, not social, rightness. She looked—he groped for the right word—wholesome.
But this wasn't Hollywood. This wasn't Broadway. This was Morton's Fork, a location in the geographical center of absolutely nowhere. Successful actress seeks roots? Not bloody likely with only one movie in the can.
Wycherly felt a growing spark of interest, a flicker of sensation in a scarred, affectless, emotional wasteland. There was something she didn't want anyone to know—even the person she was asking for help.
He'd find out what it was.
He thought of asking Sinah to get him a beer and decided to wait a while longer. He wanted to think this through.
She probably wasn't trying to manipulate him with her cock-and-bull story. What would be the point; he didn't have anything anyone could want, and he certainly didn't look like anyone who could be pegged as the anointed heir—or even the unwanted benenciary—of Musgrave, Ridenow, and Fields Investment Services and the sainted Musgrave dynasty.
No, she loved him for himself alone, so to speak. Wycherly smiled derisively. She'd get over that soon enough.
“So you think there's some sort of scandal in your mother's past,” Wycherly said. “Was she married?” If there
was one thing Wycherly understood, it was the architecture of old family scandals and never-spoken secrets.
“‘Father Unknown,' says the birth certificate, but I don't think that's it. You don't—” She stopped. “You haven't tried talking to them.” She shrugged wearily.
“I could.”
He told himself he was only making the offer because he was bored, or because there might be some later advantage to him in it. He'd known enough actors to know their entire lives revolved around drama and self-obsession—and that projecting what they wanted you to feel was their stock in trade.
“I don't know any of the quaint native peoples well, but”—he thought of Luned—“they've shown no hesitation so far in talking to me.”
Sinah turned toward him, a small jar of coffee in her hand.
“I'd be grateful,” Sinah said quietly. “For anything you can do. Whether it works or not.”
Her sincerity irritated him.
Don't thank me yet. I
won't be
any good at it
. “Don't worry,” Wycherly assured her. “It won't.”
Sinah located two thick, white, china mugs, and dumped instant coffee and white sugar into each. She already knew that Wycherly liked his coffee this way, but forced herself to ask anyway.
By then the water was boiling, and Sinah filled the cups from the pot. The kitchen was ovenlike and her clothes were sticky with sweat and streaked with soot. She'd gotten used to worse, though—some of those backstage dressing rooms were dirtier than this, and hotter.
She carried the half-empty bucket to the door and emptied out most of the rest of the water before carrying it back to where Wycherly sat. She mixed Epsom salts and boiling water together in the bucket until the salts had all dissolved, and tested the result with a finger. The water was steaming, but bearable.
“Here,” Sinah said breathlessly. “Why don't you put your foot in this for a while and see how you feel?”
“You're joking, of course.” Wycherly sounded like an affronted cat.
Without waiting for a more sensible reply, Sinah knelt down in front of him and began rolling up his pant leg.
“Watch it,” Wycherly said sharply. The possibility of pain seemed to be even more disturbing to him than its actuality.
“Why don't you take a couple more of those pain pills you had yesterday? If you're out, I've got some aspirin,” Sinah suggested.
“They're in my jacket. It's in the bedroom,” he added hastily.
“Okay, I'll get them. Just as soon as you put your foot in that bucket.”
She expected him to lash out—she felt him
want
to—but once again reality intruded: He didn't know her as well as she knew him, and more formal manners applied. There was a brief pause.
“All right.” He lowered his foot into the steaming bucket, wincing as he did so. Despite his shameless overacting, Sinah felt the pain in Wycherly's ankle ease.
“You're going to need sun cream for your face, too. You look pretty horrible,” she said.
“So kind,” Wycherly murmured, laughing at her silently.
Sinah went into the bedroom and, after only a little investigation, found Wycherly's battered leather jacket. She searched it quickly, and found the small brown bottle. It was nearly full, and had his name and address on the label, as well as a doctor's name and the logo of the dispensing pharmacy.
For a paranoid, he's awfully trusting.
She closed her hand around it without trying to memorize the information.
“Here you are,” Sinah said, coming back out. “What do you want to take them with?”
“Coffee's okay,” Wycherly said shortly. He took the bottle, removed the lid, and shook several pills out onto his
palm. He tossed them back and chased them with a swallow of coffee. “Of course, the coffee's actually horrible,” Wycherly added, smiling slyly at her.

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