The Gates of Sleep (45 page)

He shoved his way into the grove, past a couple of gorse
bushes grown up like rude boys pressing on the edge of the circle of cypress
trees. Something about this spot had suited the cypresses; they had grown tall
and thick in this place, and what had once been a circle of graceful, thin,
green columns with marble benches at their bases facing the statue that stood
at the south-point of the circle, was now a green wall. He edged himself
sideways between two of the Italian cypresses, whose dark green, brackenlike
branches resisted him for a moment, then yielded.

Then he was within the tiny grove itself, a disk of rank,
dead grass, protected from the wind and so marginally warmer than the space
outside it. There was Pan, staring down at him with a benign, slightly
mischievous grin, holding his syrinx just below his bearded lips. The benches
were all toppled, shoved over by the roots and thickening trunks of the
cypresses. The marble of the statue was darkened with grime in all the crevices,
which had the effect of making it look more like a living creature rather than
less. The hair was green with moss, a green which in this light looked black,
and the eyes had been cleverly carved so that they seemed to follow whomever
walked in front of it.

Here was relative warmth, peace, no Cold Iron, the trees of
the Italian peninsula and wilderness. Only two things were lacking to bring the
Fauns—food, and drink.

He pulled the cork from the bung-hole of the cask, and
dribbled a little on the plinth that Pan stood upon, tore off a bit of bread,
dipped it in the honey, and laid it at Pan’s feet. Ideally, he’d
have had olive oil as well, but that comestible was a bit difficult to come by
in the heart of Devon.

“You could have brought butter,”
said
a piping voice at his elbow.
“We’ve gotten used to butter.
Cheese, too, we like cheese.”

“Next time, then I will,” he replied, looking
down into the slanted, goatlike golden eyes of the little faun. The shameless
little faun, without even a loincloth to cover his privates. Unlike Pan’s—which
in the statue were modestly screened by an enormous fig leaf. Fortunately,
fauns were not as priapic in nature as the god of whom they were the votaries
and earthly representatives.

“It would only get wet,”
the Faun
pointed out cheerfully.
“Have you ever worn a wet leather loincloth?
Misery.”

“You have a point,” he admitted. “And I
have a favor to ask.”

He sensed more of them all around him, some in hiding, some
stealing up behind him. The faun at his elbow sniffed at the wine-smell
longingly, his nose twitching.
“They don’t make wine here,”
he complained.
“Only cider. It’s very good cider, really
excellent cider, but we’re
tired
of cider.”

“So this should be very welcome,” he responded,
putting the cork back in the bunghole, and carefully placing the cask, bung-end
up, on the ground. He added the loaf of bread and the jar of honey beside it. “I’m
trying to find anyone who knows the Water Mage up the hill and would be willing
to talk to me. The girl-mage, not the man.”

“Not the Christ-man in the village?”
This was another faun, who practically quivered with eagerness as his nose
filled with the scent of bread and wine.

“No, the young lady who lives in the big house
now—”

“We can’t get near,”
complained
a third, drumming on the ground with one hoof.
“They drove us out of
the garden and closed the bounds!
She
made us welcome there, the
gentle
She
with sad eyes, but they drove us out when they came!”

That would have been Madam and her son—small wonder.
He’d seen the garden now, manicured to a fare-thee-well, and bristling
with wrought-iron ornaments. Madam apparently liked wrought-iron trellises and
arbors, lampposts and what not. Taming the wildness and planting iron
everywhere would have made the fauns flee as fast as they could.

“You don’t have to try and go near her to catch
her scent; she has come to me once, and many times to the Christ-man,” he
said patiently. “Besides, to look for those who know her, you do not need
the scent. You only need the name. Names are like scent to men.”

“Both is better,”
said the first,
“But
we can do this, if we can find her scent. Did she do magic there, too?”

Fauns needed a great deal of simple explanation, sometimes.
“Yes, she did—Water magic, for she is a Water Mage. Her scent will
be there, where the Christ-man dwells, with their magic mingled with mine. And
her name is Marina Roeswood.” He stepped away from his offerings, just in
case any of the Cold Iron he was wearing in tiny bits all over his person
troubled them. Fauns were fairly robust about that, but it didn’t hurt to
be certain. “To the fruit of the vine, the harvest of the field, be
welcome,” he added, the litany that allowed them to take what he had
placed there.

A half-dozen of them swarmed his offerings like locusts,
and a moment later, they were all gone but the one that had first addressed
him. That one stood hipshot, still looking up at him.

“Marina Roeswood, blood of Earth, born of Water,”
the faun said. Andrew nodded, though he hadn’t the faintest idea what it
meant.
“Good. We will send askings, for as long as we remember.”

“Then remember this, too. I will continue to bring
Vine and Harvest here every two days for the next six, so if you have anything
to tell me, there will be more to share.” He smiled to see the faun’s
eyes widen. “And since you have gotten accustomed to butter and cheese,
there will be some of that, as well.”

“Butter is good,”
the faun said
meditatively.
“And cheese. I think remembrance will run long, if you
come every two days.”

Fortunately, there was a bit left in the original cask of
vin
ordinaire,
and no one at the sanitarium drank wine.

Isn’t
that a line out of Bram Stoker’s
novel? “I never drink… wine.
…”

Odd thought, that. But it was the truth at Briareley. The
staff was Devon born and bred, except for Eleanor, and your true Devonian
wouldn’t look at wine when there was cider about. Old fashioned fermented
cider, that is, the stuff that had a kick like a mule, and was stronger than
anyone outside the county usually suspected.

He didn’t drink wine, either, as a rule. A glass of
whisky by preference, if he felt the taste for spirits coming on—that was
where Scotland had rubbed off on him. Otherwise, tea was his drink. And he’d
never seen Eleanor touch a drop of spirit even when offered it; tea for her as
well. So the fauns could have the wine and welcome to it.

“Vine and harvest, bee-sup and butter and cheese,
all to come if wearing word. We will remember, Earth Master,”
the
faun said, with a stamp of his hoof to seal the bargain.

Then Andrew was once again alone in the clearing, with only
the knowing eyes of Pan upon him, the faint purple stain and the bit of bread
still on the plinth. The fauns would not take that bit of an offering to their
god; a bird or a mouse might steal it, but that was Pan’s will.

He saluted the god with no sense of irony, and turned to
push his way back out of the grove and into the workaday world again.

Marina sat at a desk in one of the inner offices and
trembled. She had never been so glad of anything in her life as she was glad of
the fact that Reggie had left the tour of the pottery to one of his
underlings—and that business conferences with his managers had kept him
pent up in his office all afternoon. Because it took her all afternoon to recover
from what she found in the painting-room.

It had been bad enough to discover that the pottery was a
blight, a cancer, a malignant spring spewing poison into the land, the water,
the very air. Everyone and everything around here was poisoned, more or
less—the clay-lees choked the Exe where the runoff entered it, and no
living thing could survive the murky water, not fish nor plant. Clay clogged
the gills and smothered the fish, coated the leaves of water-plants and choked
them. The clay choked the soil as well—and the lead from the glazes
killed what the clay didn’t choke. Even the air, loaded with lead vapor
and smoke from the kilns, was a hazard to everything that came in contact with
it. But those were the least of the poisons here.

The rather dull young clerk who took her around didn’t
even notice when the blood drained out of her face and she grew faint on the
first probing touch of the paintresses and their special environs. The girls
themselves were too busy to pay attention to her—she was only a female, after
all. There weren’t any of their gentleman friends there at the time, but
Marina had the idea that they’d been chivvied out long enough for her to
take her look around, and would pop out of hiding as soon as she was gone. So
there was no one to notice that she clutched at the doorpost and chattered
ridiculous questions for a good fifteen minutes before she felt ready to move
on.

Thank heavens that was the end of the tour,
she
thought, shuddering. The clerk had tucked her up in one of the managers’
offices with apologies that he couldn’t put her in Madam Chamberten’s
office, because it was Madam Chamberten’s orders that it was locked up
unless she was expected. She waved him away and asked for a pot of tea, then
changed her mind and left it untouched when she realized how much lead must be
in the water. She didn’t want to go into Madam Chamberten’s office.
Not when—that sinkhole of evil lay so close to it.

So instead, she propped her forehead on her hand and
pretended to read her poetry book, strengthening her shields from her inner
reserves, and trying to make them as invisible as all her skill could. One
touch, one single touch had told her all she needed to know.

Ellen was by no means the first, nor the only girl with
untapped magic-potential that had been drained. Every girl in that
painting-room was being drained, and more than being drained, was being
corrupted.
Oh, it was insidious enough; and really, Marina could not imagine how Ellen had
escaped permanent harm. It began with being brought into the painting-room,
with flattery as the poison worked its fatal changes and made the girls
beautiful, with pretty dresses made available to them, and cosmetics in the
form of the glaze-powders. Then the temptations began in the form of the men
who visited, and their presents, invitations, the stories of good times and
pleasure from girls who had been here a while. There were two of those girls
whose sexuality was so robust and honest that they actually got no spiritual
harm from yielding to that temptation. They enjoyed themselves to the hilt,
taking what was offered and laughingly thrust away anything that was perverse,
that was the wonder of it. But the rest were tempted to do things they felt in
their hearts were wrong, saw themselves as fallen—because they saw
themselves as fallen, they became fallen, grew hard, and then—

And then realized with horror that they were dancing with
death, as the first signs of trouble came on them. Understood that they were
doomed, and saw themselves as damned by their own actions, and despaired.

And that cesspit, that sinkhole hidden beneath the floor of
the painting room, drank it all in and stored it up, aged and refined it, then
distilled it in a dark flame of pure evil.

And then what?

She didn’t know. Something came and tapped off the
unwholesome vintage, more poisonous than the lead dust that floated in the air
of that place. It was power, that wine of iniquity; power stolen from the
girls, from their magic, from their guilt, from their despair. Three separate
vintages blended into a deadly draught that something or someone drank to the
dregs.

And she had a horrible feeling that she knew who that
someone was.

The office door opened, and she looked up. “Ready to
go?” asked Reggie, with obscene cheer. “We have a train to catch!”

She set her mouth in a false smile, and got up. “Of
course,” she replied, and managed to step quite calmly into the coat he
held out for her.

He caught up her hand and all but propelled her out of the
offices and down to the street to the inevitable cab. A glance at the
station-clock as they arrived showed the reason for his haste; they were
cutting it fine, indeed, and she broke into an undignified run beside him as
they dashed for the train.

It was only as the train pulled out of the station and she
settled into their compartment and caught her breath—taking care that she
put her face in shadow, where her expression would be more difficult to
read—that Reggie finally spoke to her again.

“Well, cuz, did you learn all you wanted to?”
he asked genially.

And she was very, very glad for her caution, because she
was certain that her eyes, at least, would have betrayed her, as she answered
him.

“Oh yes, Reggie,” she said, exerting every bit
of control she had to keep her voice even. “I certainly did. More than I ever
dreamed.”

MARINA had never been so sure of anything in her life as
she was that Reggie and his mother were behind the dreadful evil beneath their
pottery.

And yet within the hour, Marina was sitting across from
Reggie in the dining car, a sumptuous tea laid out on the table between them,
listening to him chatter with bewilderment.

“Good for me to show the face every so often there,”
he said, after she had sat across from him, numb and sick, trying to get as far
from him as she could and still be unobtrusive. “Never on a schedule, of
course. Unexpected; that way they can’t play any jiggery-pokery. Mater
gives me a pretty free hand there—well, except for that emergency, I don’t
think she’s set foot in the place for a year. So the running of the place
is my doing.”