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and see."
"Sure." If I'm still alive. Winter wondered where the conviction had
sprung from that she, instead of those around her, was personally at risk.
Even though she honestly felt the truth of it, her emotions seemed curi-
ously uninvolved. She followed Nina across the crowded courtyard.
Vegetable Love was an evident college hangout, filled with noisy
oblivious students in flannel and denim and spandex; the sort of untidy,
undignified crowd that usually made Winter irritable. But this time,
when that knee-jerk reaction began, she forced herself to step back and
view it dispassionately. There was no earthly sensible reason for this blast
of withering contempt that roared through her, except to estrange her
from a group of people who could not possibly be all that bad.
As it always did. Cutting her off, isolating her from everyone who did
not match an increasingly narrow set of specifications. Until, in the end,
Winter would be all alone. Alone. Helpless.
Was there something that wanted that? Something stalking her?
Nina found them a table in the corner because, all tolerance and even
approval aside, neither of them was interested in being stepped on by the
Doc Martens that were still all the rage for the under-thirty crowd, and
the tables were pretty close together.
"Whoa! What a crush!" Nina said, sliding into her seat. "Still, I love
it. Do you remember when it opened?"
Winter felt a sudden pang of fear, which dissipated when Nina an-
swered her own question. "But you wouldn't--sorry!--you're Class of
'eighty-two and Veg didn't open until nineteen eighty-five." With an
apologetic grin, Nina devoted herself to the menu.
W I T C H L IG H T 71
Saved, Winter thought with an inward sigh, and reached for her own
menu. But she couldn't go on pretending forever--not when she was sur-
rounded daily by the reminders of how easily everyone else seemed to re-
call their adolescent years, moving swiftly between Then and Now
through the facility of their own mental time machines.
Maybe it would come back to her. Even now, she felt that if she held
very still and didn't startle them, the memories of her college days were
close enough to touch.
Almost.
"Are you sure this is the right way?" Winter asked nervously half an hour
later. She was grateful for the impulse that had led her to invite Nina
along on this expedition. If Winter had been by herself, she would almost
certainly have missed the turnoff from County 4- The side-road--a few
miles past the turnoff for Greyangels Road--wasn't even marked, and af-
ter about half a mile the blacktop on the one-and-a-half lane road-by-
courtesy vanished altogether.
"It's the only way," Nina said cheerfully. "I'm an amateur herbalist, so
I ramble all through The Angels looking for plants--there's a shop in
town that sells herbal mixtures, and Tabby's always on the lookout for
suppliers--I haven't been up here since my student days, but I know the
area pretty well, and this is the only road that goes down to the river.
Hang on!"
The gravel that had replaced the blacktop petered out, and the dirt
road that remained became progressively more rutted. At last Nina
tapped the brake a few times and shifted the car into neutral.
"I don't want to go any further, and the lake's less than half a mile
from here anyway. Why don't you go on ahead--I've got my stuff in the
back; I want to look around by the car and see if I can find anything
worth harvesting."
"I don't know how long I'm going to be," Winter said reluctantly.
"Oh, don't worry about me! I go on one of my rambles and lose all
sense of time. If I'm not at the car when you get back just honk the horn
a couple of times, and if I get done first I'll come look for you. Just keep
an eye on the sun, though--you don't want to try to find your way back
here in the dark."
72 MARION Z IM M E R BRADLEY
"I shouldn't be that long. I just want to take a look," Winter said. Sh
got out of the car, grateful for the sensible Reeboks that made walkinl
down the trail not only possible, but a pleasure. In a few moments sh4
had rounded a bend in the trail, and Nina's Honda was lost to sight.
It was puzzling, Winter mused as she walked along. She remembered
buildings at Nuclear Lake, and Nina had said there'd been some sort ot
lab here. Yet the path beneath her feet was hardly more than a trail
now--how had people driven to work? Nina said there wasn't any other
road leading in to the Nuclear Lake property.
She also said she hadn't been ~p here in years, Winter reminded herself.
There must be another road in. Even if the facility had been deserted
for--what? twenty years or more?--a two-laned blacktopped access road
just couldn't get itself into this condition in less than a century.
Could it?
Just how much can I say I REALLY know about the nature of Reality, eonsid~
ering everything? Winter asked herself snidely. And then she saw the lake.
It was not large. The trail she'd been following swung wide around it,
and, at this time of year, the water lilies that turned the quiet backwaters
of the Hudson into carpets of living green were not yet in bloom; Win-
ter could see straight to the bottom, with its round stones, occasional
Coke can, and fugitive anonymous fish. It looked both peaceful and
tempting, though the water was still too chilly for wading and much too
chilly to swim.
Across the lake and a little to the left of it she could see a building--
the oh-so-mysterious research laboratory. Squaring her shoulders in an-
ticipation of another hike--she was still in lousy physical shape after all
that bed rest, for all that she'd used to go to the gym three times a
week--Winter struck off in that direction.
The building had looked perfectly intact from across the lake; it was
built in that style common to the sixties and early seventies that made no
concession to the organic reality of its surroundings, as if it were poised
to leap right into some hygienic future composed entirely of brushed alu-
minum and Formica. But once she got closer, Winter could see that the
perfection was only an illusion. The loops of polychrome spray-paint
'W IT C H LI G H T 73
graffiti covering every exposed surface and the drifts of liquor bottles and
fast-food trash were evidence enough of that.
She was indignant and comforted at the same time. How dare these
people trespass on grounds that were so special to her? Yet if they did
come here, it certainly indicated that nothing weird or harmful had
claimed the place for its own.
Winter walked closer, her memories shifting and rippling like the
stones seen through lake water. Was the building a little more battered
than she remembered it? Did she really remember it at all? Winter stud-
ied the sight before her carefully. The main building was two stories tall
and had a long one-story wing branching off' to the right. The front wall
of the wing was all glass; a wall of uncurtained windows; and vines had
grown across several of them. Others were broken, and Winter could see
a slurry of leaves and trash on the floor inside.
For a moment a hotter sun than this shone down on her shoulders--
May, almost summer, and she and the others coming here again just as
they did every week, to-- What?
The memory and its certainty Faded, and Winter swore under her
breath. If memory was personality, then hers was fading in and out like a
weak radio signal.
Enough of this. Instinct told her she'd gone inside before, so she'd go
inside again now. Maybe that would trigger something more--some-
thing she could hold onto.
The cement steps at the building's front had stood the test of time, and
even the front door, though glass, was reasonably intact, with only one
sunburst crack marring its integrity. Winter, pulling on it, was surprised [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]