“Good luck,” Colin said absently. The only fingerprints Hodge was likely to find were those of the children here in the house, and that would hardly be of help to him. Neither of these blades had been used to kill.
Both swords were custom-forged ritual blades, their steel etched with runes. The black-hilted sword had silver furnishings and a spherical moonstone pommel; the white hilt had a gold haft and quillons, with a carnelian cube for the pommel weight. Colin straightened up, looking around.
“Did you find a book?” he asked.
“A book?” Hodge said suspiciously. “What kind of a book?”
“This would be …” Colin closed his eyes and thought, trying to put his description in words they’d understand. “A handwritten book, possibly fairly large, but elaborately bound in any case.” The design of Thorne’s Temple told him that much about the magician’s style: flamboyant, as Thorne himself had been. “It would contain a number of diagrams. It might not be in English.”
Every magician Colin had ever known kept a magickal workbook, and if he could find Thorne’s, it might give him a clue to what had happened here.
“Sid! You seen a book here?” Hodge barked.
One of the crime-scene technicians straightened up; he had been photographing one of the fallen statues. “This whole place is full of books, Leo,” he said disgustedly. “They got a whole library full.”
“Something handwritten—like a trick book,” Hodge said. Sid shrugged.
“We’ll look for it, Doc,” he said to Colin. “So. These guys weren’t Satanists?”
“No,” Colin said absently, looking around the room. I’m not sure what they were, but it wasn’t that. “I can tell you that much right now. Their rituals would have been something more like … are you a Mason, by any chance, Lieutenant?”
Hodge stared at him suspiciously, obviously not intending to answer the question.
“At any rate, these rituals certainly wouldn’t have involved any unwilling participants, so if you’re hoping to close the books on any missing children, Lieutenant, I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere”
“The only missing child I’m interested in is Blackburn,” Hodge growled. “And those three kids. All this … stuff wouldn’t happen to tell you where any of them are, would it, Doc?”
Colin sighed inwardly, giving up on the hope of getting the Lieutenant to call him “Mr.” or even “Colin.” He thought about what Jonathan and the others had said about Thorne.
He’s gone.
He never left the Temple.
“I’m sorry,” Colin said. “I haven’t the faintest idea. For what it’s worth, I hope you find them all, Lieutenant.”
“Oh, we’ll find them, all right,” Hodge said.
Two of the children were located an hour later, when a deputy heard them crying—they’d shut themselves into a cupboard upstairs when the commotion had started, and then couldn’t get out. Nine-year-old Pilgrim, Thorne’s son by an unknown mother, was found in the woods behind the house after a five-day absence. The area had been searched several times before, without success, so it was believed that Pilgrim had received adult assistance in his disappearance—Pilgrim refused to tell them where he’d been. The boy was turned over to the child protective services to join the rest of the children from Shadow’s Gate.
And though there were roadblocks on every main road in Dutchess County for a week, and the entire area was combed with dogs and helicopters, Thorne Blackburn was never found.
Colin did what he could to help the surviving members of Thorne’s Circle, goaded by a combination of nebulous guilt and outrage at the way they were treated. The murder/disappearance at Shadow’s Gate quickly became a media circus, and like the ancient Roman circuses which it so closely resembled, sacrificial victims were required.
Irene Avalon, Jonathan Ashwell, Deborah Winwood, and the rest of the active members of the Circle of Truth—who were already being held as material witnesses—were formally arrested on May 3 on a smorgasbord of charges, including drug dealing and conspiracy to commit a felony.
It was a witch hunt, pure and simple: the Establishment against the hippies. Without Thorne to protect them, his followers were easy prey. Those who had not been arrested were turned out of the mansion and the site “sealed,” but that didn’t keep the estate from being overrun by looters and curiosity seekers who stripped it nearly bare before the authorities would consent to the expensive necessity of posting a twenty-four-hour guard over the estate.
“There’s so little I can do, Caroline,” Colin said sadly.
It was late July, and the fan turning lazily overhead brought the scent of simmering asphalt from the street outside. They were sitting in a booth in a diner outside the county courthouse in Poughkeepsie. Caroline had come to file another in what seemed to be an unending series of petitions; Katherine Jourdemayne was dead, but Katherine’s daughter lived, and Caroline was desperately trying to gain custody of her.
Hovering over them both was the grim memory of Deborah Winwood’s suicide six weeks before. Despite her lawyer’s best efforts, Deborah had been declared an unfit mother, and her baby girl had been taken away from her. The prosecution took her death soon after as a vindication of its judgment, but Colin’s heart ached for the despair that had prompted Deborah to take her own life. It seemed a final mockery that the charges against the Shadowkill Twelve had been dropped just a week later.
“At least Johnnie’s dad sprang for a good lawyer,” Caroline said with a sigh.
General Jonathan Griswold Ashwell II held the same opinion of his son as he did of his country: mine, right or wrong. He’d had the money and clout to get the charges against his son dropped, and the grudging but rock-ribbed sense of fair play to insist that Jonathan’s codefendants be treated in the same way that Jonathan had been. Conspiracy charges had been dropped, and bail had finally been set. It was likely that the drug charges would be quietly dropped before the cases came to trial.
“How are you doing?” Colin asked.
Caroline sipped her coffee. “As well as can be expected. That poor baby! She cries and clings to me every time they let me see her—” Her voice roughened and she stopped. When she spoke again, her voice was deliberately cheerful, with a bravery that came near to breaking Colin’s heart.
“But thank God for birth certificates. They can’t deny that Kate was my sister or that Truth is her daughter. I’m Truth’s closest living relative; they have to grant me custody, don’t they, no matter what that damned psychiatrist says? I swear to you, if he whines one more time about the advantages of Truth having a home with a father and a mother—if I would just give her up for adoption. As if single women weren’t out there raising children every day—” She stopped herself again and took another sip of coffee.
“Sorry. Sorry. But you see, don’t you, how very careful I have to be? Respectability is all I have going for me. I’ve sworn myself blue-faced assuring them that I never had anything to do with the commune, or … him. And I’ve got to keep it that way. One reefer, and that’s all it would take. I’d never see Truth again. And she’s all I have left, of either of them.”
“I understand,” Colin said quietly. “And as I’ve told you, if there is anything that Claire or I can do, for either of you …”
“You’ve already done so much, both of you. I’m sure I’d have gone mad without a shoulder to cry on these past few weeks. That just makes what I need to say so much harder.”
Colin waited.
“Stay away.” Caroline stared at her plate, her sandwich nearly untouched. “And tell the others, the rest of the Circle, if you talk to them. Stay away. I can’t afford … any appearance of impropriety, if you follow. Not if I’m to get Truth.”
Colin smiled to himself grimly. Guilt by association, the terror-tactic of the fascist state. Here in sixties America, alive and well. He was not offended. Caroline was right—even the most respectable parapsychologist was too outré for the connection to do her
any good.
He reached across the table and patted her hand. “It’s all right, Caroline. I understand, and Claire will, too. Thorne has already been tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty. The only thing you can do is open up as much distance between yourself, and him, and various fellow travelers as you can.”
“It’s so unfair,” Caroline whispered huskily. “They just want to crucify him for telling them they could be free. And he was right. Wasn’t he?”
Colin had no answer for her.
INTERLUDE #5
JULY 1969
LOOKING BACK UPON IT FROM ACROSS THE BRIDGE OF YEARS, I think that 1969 was the year that the battle lines were really drawn. Thorne’s disappearance in May was, in a weird way, almost a sort of prelude to the Tate-LaBianca murders that August. After that, the Age of Aquarius was firmly intertwined in the public mind with insanity, torture, and murder … .
In October, one of Thorne’s dreams was realized when a quarter of a million people marched against death in Washington D.C., forming a circle around the Pentagon, chanting and holding hands, attempting to destroy the war machine through pure love. If Thorne had been alive to lead them, I wonder—would it have worked?
In a strange way, his death hardened Colin—I think he always felt personally responsible for what happened at Shadow’s Gate, even though the Almighty Himself could not have changed Thorne’s mind once he’d decided to do something. But after that terrible night, Colin focused more and more on insulating innocents from the kiss of the Unseen, as if somehow that could redeem those who had died at Shadow’s Gate.
All around us through those dark months, events seemed to conspire to hold up a mirror to our dreams and nightmares, showing us how much we had changed in ten short years. Within twenty-four hours of Neil Armstrong’s walk upon the moon—something that should have been a glorious landmark in human history—the horror of Chappaquiddick had pushed Apollo 11 off the front pages. Somehow, unfairly, it seemed worse that a Kennedy had done this thing, as though somehow the family that we’d pinned our national hopes to had betrayed us—as if they had held the soul of America in their keeping and had failed some trust.
I think it was that sense of betrayal that sent my generation to Woodstock in such passionate numbers, as if now that all hope of regaining Camelot was truly gone, we needed a new dream to sustain us. Woodstock became a myth even while it was happening, and the myth grew in splendor until, the following year, Abbie Hoffman could claim citizenship in the Woodstock Nation.
In some way, Thorne was one of the lucky ones—he did not live to see it. I know that he would have seen then what I only thought of years later—that the apotheosis of a generation was also its end, the moment when the best and the brightest among us abandoned us and themselves, setting the stage for what was to follow.
They’d given their hearts to a dream, you see, and the dream had died. The Woodstock Nation was a dream, and no one could live there. Or if they could, it was, like Neverland, a country of the young, and Time is the one thing that no one can argue with. Time passed for my generation as it had for our parents, driving us out of the Nation. When we discovered that our own hearts had betrayed us, we were abandoned in a world that had no more dreams.
Without a dream to light your way, the world is a very dark place.
TEN
NEW YORK, AUTUMN 1972
O! never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
NEW YORK SEEMED TO GROW DARKER AND DIRTIER EVERY YEAR, Colin MacLaren thought to himself in resignation. He knew better than to ascribe that dour observation to anything other than the passing of years; he was two years past the half-century mark, the point at which any man must stop and consider his life.
For most of his early life his inner sight had been dazzled by the enormity of the battle in which the Light was engaged, but the passing of years had reminded him that the generalship of that great struggle was not his, nor had it ever truly been. Slowly he had learned to concentrate on those battles within the reach of his hand. It was not his to build the cathedral, nor to tear it down; only to repair what other hands had made, so that the hands to come after could take up such work in their turn.
And when he was not called to that Labor, Colin did his other work—a small, undramatic, and purely mundane striving to enlighten the great mass of people.
Selkie Press was a small, independent publisher of occult books—teetering, like all such presses, on the verge of bankruptcy. It was dedicated to collecting and reprinting important material in the field of magick and the supernatural. Under Colin’s editorship, a number of classics of parapsychological research had been brought back into print, as well as more esoteric items of interest to a small yet dedicated readership.
Last year Selkie Press had reprinted Margrave and Anstey’s The Natural History of the Poltergeist, Taverner’s Ha’ants, Spooks, and Fetchmen, and a number of extracts from a medieval Spanish grimoire called La Tesoraria del Oro.
In Colin’s opinion the grimoire was a thoroughly dangerous book, and he saw no reason to make its potential available to the world at large. He’d edited the press’s version of La Tesoraria rigorously and without a single qualm. There was a middle ground between censorship and utter irresponsibility, and there was certain information which Colin would not freely dispense any more than he would give a baby a loaded gun. Responsible stewardship was the first commandment of his Lodge, and Colin kept the faith.
As Thorne Blackburn had not.
Reflexively, Colin put the old pain from him. Thorne was dead and the world had moved on, much as if what had happened at Shadow’s Gate had ended the morning of the Aquarian Age in one fell stroke of night. These days, it seemed impossible that anyone had ever seriously thought that they could reshape the material world with magick.
The hard brilliant light that was such a feature of a New York autumn gilded the brick walls of the buildings across the back courtyard and turned the tiny scrap of sky he could see a deep Egyptian blue. This time of year always made Colin feel restless, as though he were late in setting out upon a journey.
Perhaps he was.
Sighing, Colin set the book he was reading—a biography of a pioneer in the field of parapsychology that Selkie was thinking of reprinting—down on the desk in his tiny back bedroom office. He missed the view from the top floor, but the first floor had been the only apartment vacant when he’d decided to move back East, and Colin had hated the thought of evicting a tenant for nothing more than a whim. And the first-floor apartment had its compensations—there was a fireplace in the living room.
He gave the book a farewell pat and dismissed it from his mind. He had a couple of weeks before his report on it was due to Alan, and another engagement for this evening.
The Sorcery Shoppe was located in the east Thirties, just off Sixth Avenue (like all true New Yorkers, Colin had never been able to adjust to its rechristening as the Avenue of the Americas, even after thirty years). The brisk walk uptown from his apartment reminded him of how much he still loved the city, despite its many flaws. The great occultist Dion Fortune had once written that in the major population centers, one could see Civilization as it would be twenty years in the future.
If that were so, then the future was a place in which only the strong would survive. New York’s population had nearly doubled since the fifties; the grace notes to daily living that cities such as San Francisco still retained were being hammered out of Baghdad on the Hudson beneath the heavy hand of progress. Colin tried to imagine the streets around him in another twenty years’ time and could not manage it. Our vision always fails in the homely things, not the great. His first teacher had told him that.
The Shoppe stood out among its neighbors, a bright peacock among a flock of dingy commercial establishments. It was that rarest of beasts, a store catering to the occult and New Age that predated the Age of Aquarius. While its st
ock consisted primarily of books—many of them Selkie Press titles—it also sold herbs, candles, and other oddments.
The building in which the Sorcery Shoppe was housed was over a century old and had begun its life, long ago, as a pharmacy and soda fountain. All that remained from that long-ago incarnation was the pressed tin ceiling (now painted black), the parquet marble floor, and the long mirror that filled all one side of the shop. Now greenish and corroded with age, the mirror served as a backdrop to jar-filled shelves of dried herbs, causing the unwary to startle when they caught a glimpse of themselves in the ravaged mirror beyond the jars. The storefront was painted bright red and dotted with black-and-yellow cabalistic symbols, and a black banner with silver letters hanging from a flagpole over the door proclaimed the shop’s name.
As Colin approached, he could see that the display window was, as always, draped in black velvet, and bestrewn with the most lurid of the Sorcery Shoppe’s merchandise: illuminated crystal balls, star-tipped Wizard Wands, dried bats, human skulls, and other lurid Hollywood paraphernalia.
As its name suggested, the Sorcery Shoppe happily catered to the more sensational aspects of magick, serving as the crossroads for most of Manhattan’s esoteric community no matter their Path or inclination, but alongside its amulets and voodoo-doll kits, it carried serious scholarly books impossible to find elsewhere, and hosted lectures given by authorities in their various fields. Colin himself had lectured here on a number of occasions.
Today, however, he had not come to lecture, but rather to hear a lecture given by John Cannon, a notorious popularizer of the occult in the Hans Holtzer vein. Unfortunately, there was a certain amount of meat to Cannon’s books—sound research and extensive quotations from public domain sources—but Cannon’s books, for all the facts they contained, were not meant to teach. They were meant to entertain and titillate, producing in their readers the same sort of pleasurable fear that a child experienced in walking past a “haunted” house.
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