He decided to walk at least partway home, in hope of finding an off-duty cab, and went a few blocks out of his way to inspect the big tree at Rockefeller Center. It towered brilliantly over the plaza, its colored lights casting a sort of a magic glow over its surroundings in token of the greater Light that this season celebrated. The air had that almost-minty bite that spoke of snow, but even four days before Christmas, any flurries they got weren’t likely to stick.
Colin felt his heavy mood lighten a little and was even moved to purchase a copy of the Times from a kiosk at the edge of the plaza. Claire always accused him of burying his head in his work and paying little attention to current events.
Perhaps he had, but he couldn’t imagine how even the most scrupulous attention to world events could have warned him about the reappearance of Toller Hasloch in his life. The boy had been so young … Colin had always hoped that the fright he’d given him had been enough to turn him away from the Shadow, but in his heart, he’d always know it hadn’t been.
Almost absentmindedly, Colin reached toward his pocket, feeling for the weight of a gun that wasn’t there:
It was half past eleven when Colin let himself into the apartment. Claire was fast asleep, wrapped in a quilt and curled up in Colin’s big leather easy chair. The phone was nestled in her lap like a sleeping cat.
As Colin shut the door, she roused.
“Oh, Colin.” She looked at her watch. “You’re back early.”
“I don’t suppose I even need to ask if there were any calls?” Colin said, taking off his ancient topcoat and tossing it over a chair, dropping the newspaper on top of it.
“Not unless you count an opinion poll and somebody trying to sell you the New York Times,” Claire said, setting the telephone back on its table and unwinding herself from the quilt. “Oh, and a wrong number—but I think they figured that out for themselves; they hung up in the middle of a sentence.” She got to her feet and stretched. “How was your dinner?” She paused, and looked at him closely. “Colin, you don’t look well.”
“I got some disturbing news tonight. You remember Toller Hasloch?” ,
“Ugh.” Claire made a face. “How could I ever forget? Such a charming man—and such a way with the ladies. Don’t tell me you ran into him tonight, Colin. I’d been hoping he was dead.”
“Not quite. Apparently he’s practicing law in New York now … and his law firm was one of those bidding on the Rhodes Group library.”
“Brrr.” Claire gave a not-entirely-theatrical shiver. “Well, I hope you aren’t going to tell me he got it. Tea? I think I could use a cup before hearing all the gory details.” Claire strode off to the kitchen, and in a few moments Colin heard her moving around between stove and refrigerator.
He wandered around the room, flipping on a few more lights, and then picked up the paper. He skimmed through it—Apollo 17 was still heading for Earth without incident, the Watergate conspirators were moving closer to trial—and tossed it aside. Its contents seemed to have no bearing on his life.
By then Claire had returned, carrying a large tray. Colin moved a pile of papers and she set it down, using a large ottoman as a makeshift table. There was a plate of Christmas cookies on the tray, and Colin raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, you know how it goes,” Claire said. “This time of year you can hardly escape a few Christmas cookies. Last week I got two fruitcakes, so I squirreled one away here for emergencies.”
“Or at least for whatever emergencies can be addressed by a serving of fruitcake,” Colin said, selecting a cookie for himself.
“You’d be surprised,” Claire said placidly. “Most of life’s crises can be settled with a good meal, a stiff drink, and a hot bath. Toller Hasloch, however, does not fall into this category. So he’s practicing law in New York? I wish I’d known before I moved here, then. But what does he want with a bunch of books? He never struck me as much of a reader, somehow.”
“Not the reference library, but the case histories,” Colin said. “And in any event, he didn’t get it.”
“There must be more to things to put that look on your face. What else?”
“I think,” Colin said slowly, “that he’s practicing a little more than law. But if he is, what he’s doing is very well hidden. In the last six weeks I think you and I have hit up every single Left-Hand practitioner in Manhattan and the boroughs, not to mention selected locations in Westchester and Long Island, and we haven’t heard of anything even remotely similar to that bad patch back in Berkeley.”
“Thule Gesellschaft.” Claire pronounced the word as if it were the name of a loathsome disease. “You’d think we’d have gotten a hint if he were up to his old tricks.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?” said Colin musingly. “I suppose that means he isn’t, but that’s something I’m not willing to take on faith. As soon as this John Cannon thing is settled, I’m going to make it my business to deal with Hasloch personally. I may not be allowed by my oaths to interfere in the lives and destinies of ordinary people, but perhaps an exception can be made for Hasloch.”
“Why don’t you ask Can …” Claire’s voice drifted away as she sat with a teacup poised halfway to her mouth. Her eyes had taken on a faraway look. “Cold. So cold. Oh, Colin, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Claire?” Colin said, very softly.
“They’ve gotten Lucille,” Claire said. Though her voice was still her own, her manner of speaking had changed, until Colin could almost visualize John Cannon sitting in front of him. “Colin, you’ve got to save—” Her voice broke off. “Save …”
Claire stopped and blinked, her eyes focusing. “Save what?” she asked in her normal voice. “Did I just nod off here?”
“Not quite,” Colin said. “I think someone was using you to deliver a message.” Someone who passed through the wards I have set about this place as if they didn’t exist.
Claire looked around the room vaguely, as though searching for the messenger in the corners of the ceiling. “There’s no one here now,” she pronounced decisively. She drained her tea and glanced at her watch again. “Will it keep, do you think, or should I try to call it back?”
Colin hesitated. “Let me make a phone call, first.”
Cannon did not answer his phone, and after Colin had let it ring thirty times, he knew that no one would. “They’ve gotten Lucille—” the voice had said. He tried both of Madame Lucille’s numbers as well, but no one answered there, either. He hoped she had taken his advice to leave New York, but knew in his heart that she hadn’t.
“I think you’d better see what you can raise,” he said grimly. There was only one force he knew of that could pass through the wards an Adept set about himself—that of the pure spirit in the lands of Death.
“Nothing.” Forty minutes later, Claire shook her head decisively. She set the shewstone aside, rewrapping it carefully as she did so. “I’m sorry.”
“You did your best,” Colin said. “I’m sorry to have kept you so long. I’ll call you a taxi—I don’t want you riding the subway at this hour.”
“And what about you?” Claire demanded suspiciously. She found her answer in Colin’s expression. “Not without me you don’t, buster.”
At two o’clock in the morning, all the windows of the buildings lining Gramercy Park were dark.
Colin wasn’t entirely certain of why he had come. There was nothing he could do here, and he certainly couldn’t go banging on Cannon’s door in the middle of the night, demanding to know if he were all right. Cannon had not asked him to intervene. Colin’s hands were, in a sense, tied.
“Anything?” he asked hopefully.
Claire shook her head. “Just the usual residual nastiness you’ll find on any city street. What are you going to do, Colin?”
Colin sighed, shaking his head wearily. “The only thing I can do—wait for a new day and start over. Tomorrow morning—well, later today—I’ll see what his publisher can tell me. I wonder if Jock kept his final appointment?”<
br />
He’d only been asleep for a few hours when the phone rang.
“MacLaren.”
“Colin? Turn on the radio to that news station,” Claire said. “Quick.”
Colin sat up and quickly activated the clock-radio beside his bed. He kept the radio alarm tuned to 1010 WINS; in seconds the abrasive tones of twenty-four-hour news radio filled the bedroom.
“—and noted popularizer John Cannon, dead today at age forty-nine. Cannon, the author of several books on the occult such as The Devil in America—”
Colin raised the phone to his ear again. “I heard,” he said tersely. Rest easy, John Cannon. You will be avenged.
“When I got home this morning I just couldn’t sleep. There was a bit in the morning paper, too, just a squib on the Obits page. They’re calling it a heart attack. I’ll hope that’s true. But I can’t shake this feeling—sort of a vague nagging, nothing concrete enough to act on—that there’s someplace I need to be. So I guess my work for today is to wander around and see if I strike into it.”
“Good luck,” Colin said. “I’ll give you a call this evening and we can compare notes. I’m going to see if John Cannon kept his last appointment.”
As he was dressing to go over to Blackcock, another phone call came. This one was from Alan Daggonet, the owner of Selkie Press, reminding him that there was a production meeting scheduled for this morning.
Reluctantly, Colin headed uptown to Alan Daggonet’s brownstone. His visit to Blackcock would have to wait a few hours.
After the meeting, Daggonet took him aside.
“I’m afraid it’s not good news, Colin, but I wouldn’t be doing you any service by holding it back. You know we’ve been in trouble financially for several years now … .”
“Is this a pink slip, Alan?” Colin asked quietly.
Alan Daggonet was the scion of an old New York family, and Selkie Press had been his pet project for almost twenty-five years. But recession and inflation combined had conspired to put book publishing out of the financial reach of even a rich man, and Colin had been expecting news of this sort for months.
“Oh, Lord no!” Alan said, appalled. “At Christmas? I’m not quite that much of a Scrooge! No, we can make payroll for a few months yet, but come January I’m going to be putting the press on the market. Not that I think there’s the possibility of a buyer, but disposing of the inventory may defray some of our debts. And most of our authors are dead, so there is the backlist on the asset side of the ledger. But I’m afraid that we’re done for. Barring a miracle, of course.”
Colin sighed, trying to take an interest in the problem, though his thoughts were largely elsewhere.
“What about the books I’m working on now?” he asked.
Daggonet shrugged. “Anything that’s already in production, fine, but nothing new. We’ll need to get together in January after I’ve talked with the lawyers, but I wanted to give you as much warning as possible.”
“I appreciate it,” Colin said. He shook Daggonet’s hand. “My best to Barry.”
“You’ll have to come by the place for a drink,” Daggonet said. His voice was hollow. Alan Daggonet was a gentle man, and hated to be the bearer of bad news.
“Sure,” Colin said. “And do try to have a Merry Christmas, Alan.”
So. Perhaps I should look into that Taghkanic thing Michael mentioned after all, Colin thought to himself as he reached the street. He’d always known that Selkie Press wasn’t something meant to last forever, but getting his walking papers so abruptly was still something of a shock. Still, he was willing to bet he didn’t feel half as bad about things as Daggonet did.
And Colin had much bigger fish to fry at the moment.
By now it was nearly noon, and Colin’s stomach was reminding him that he’d missed breakfast. He was on York Avenue in the upper eighties; hardly an area in which he was likely to find an open pizza joint. Still, there ought to be a coffee shop somewhere in the area where he could snatch a quick bite.
He was just crossing Park Avenue when he felt a sudden tugging, as precipitously as if someone were plucking at his coat. He glanced around, trying to see what had summoned his attention.
Across the street, he saw a building of professional suites nestled between two old dowagers of apartment buildings. It stood out sharply to his schooled perception, as though it was illuminated by a separate light.
When the traffic light changed, he crossed the street and inspected the building’s entryway more closely. None of the names on the brass plates—Clinton, Wynitch, Barnes—were particularly familiar to him, though Wynitch woke a vague spark of recognition in his mind. Oh yes. An ugly little scandal a few years ago, when a boy he was treating committed suicide.
Someone in there needs help. Of this, Colin was quite certain.
But not now. Not yet. He had another errand to run first.
Blackcock Books’ offices were located on the sunny side of Park Avenue South, down in the thirties. Though small by the standards of older publishing firms, their offices still took up an entire floor of their building, including a stylish foyer containing the company logo, executed in brushed aluminum and mounted on the fabric-covered wall behind the receptionist’s desk. A tinsel-cloaked Christmas tree stood in the corner of the foyer, testament to the season.
Blackcock published paperback originals exclusively; it was one of the publishing houses that had sprung up like mushrooms in the last thirty years to handle what had been (at the time) a new, low-cost format that no one had really thought would ever endure. But these days, over half of all new books weren’t even published in hardcover anymore, but only in the cheap disposable paperback format. Only one of John Cannon’s vast and varied output—The Occult History of the New World—had ever seen hardcover publication, and it hadn’t been Blackcock that had published it.
Several of his other books, however, made up a lurid display on the wall behind the chair where Colin MacLaren was sitting.
He had identified himself to the receptionist and asked to speak to James Melford. As he’d surmised, the next person he saw was not Melford, but a pretty young woman in a very short skirt who introduced herself as Peggy Kane and identified herself as James Melford’s assistant. She, too, asked his business, but when Colin told her that his business was private, she had accepted that with a good grace and disappeared once more.
He’d been waiting now for more than an hour, and was wondering if they simply hoped he’d go away, when Ms. Kane returned again. Colin followed her through the door into the Blackcock offices.
This close to the holiday, most of the staff was on vacation, and the bareness of the desks in the little cubicles along the hallway reflected that fact. But despite the barrenness of the office, it had a slovenly, unkempt look that went far beyond the normal chaos of editorial offices. Potted plants had been hastily righted, but the dirt spilled when they’d been overturned had only been hastily and sketchily tidied.
It was a calculated risk, Colin knew, to come to Cannon’s publisher on such an outlandish mission as this. But Cannon’s last manuscript, like a literary Typhoid Mary, would continue to spread death and destruction in its wake so long as the black coven was trying to suppress it.
Ms. Kane stopped outside a door and knocked perfunctorily before opening the door and ushering Colin inside.
James Melford was a man in his early forties. His curly light brown hair—worn long in the fashion of a man who was late for a haircut—curled over the collar of his striped Oxford shirt. His jacket was tossed over the back of his chair, and the room was filled with boxed manuscripts and other publishing ephemera, including two framed awards and something that looked like a comic-strip spaceship cast in bronze. Its display stand had been cracked—Colin was willing to bet recently. The sense of derangement in this office was, if possible, even stronger than that in the hall outside. He stood when Colin arrived.
“Mr. MacLaren. How are you? You’re a friend of Jock’s, aren’t you? I remember
him mentioning you to me a few months ago. I don’t know quite how to bring this up, but—”
“I know that Cannon’s dead,” Colin said. “And how he died. In a way that’s why I’m here. Mr. Melford, I’ve come to see you about John Cannon’s last book—”
He was entirely unprepared for Melford’s reaction.
“Get out!” James Melford roared, rising to his feet.
It took Colin several tense minutes to convince Cannon’s editor that he was not a minion of the black coven that had been harassing Cannon—and had broken into Blackcock’s offices just last night in search of the publisher’s copy of the manuscript.
Unfortunately, that was the only thing that Colin managed to convince Jamie Melford of, and by the time he left the office half an hour later, he wasn’t completely sure that Melford didn’t believe that Colin was, if not somehow connected to the group that had murdered Cannon, at the very least an unwitting dupe of their schemes. He had certainly not convinced Melford to either suppress the manuscript or to let him have a look at it.
Still, perhaps the seeds he had sown here today would bear wholesome fruit in the future. And at least he now knew how determined the black coven was. Murder by magick was one thing—a wholly physical break-in was quite another, and in one sense, far more menacing.
For a moment, Colin wondered what secret they could have that they would have revealed to an outsider—John Cannon—and yet still go to such lengths to protect. Colin himself, oddly, had more reason to wish to suppress such a book as Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today than they did. Based on his recollection of Cannon’s lecture, the manuscript undoubtedly provided a detailed occult workbook for the mentally unbalanced.
“Would you give a baby a loaded gun?” Colin had asked Jamie Melford in their interview, but he knew that Melford had not grasped the analogy. Melford was an editor, a man whose business was books—yet at one and the same time he could believe that there was nothing more powerful than the written word and that written words could do no harm. Colin prayed that Melford would never discover differently—though he had failed to protect Cannon, Colin vowed he would not fail twice. Even without gaining access to the manuscript, Colin still had one lead.
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