Heartlight
Page 53
With a cry, she cut through the single rope that was looped around Brian’s body in an elaborate cable-tow. Once the cord was broken, he began struggling free. Sally flung the knife as far from her as she could; Claire heard it ring out as it struck the rock.
Claire wasn’t sure what good Sally thought Madison Corners police would be—ten to one, there were a few of them already here—but it was a brave gesture.
“Kill them both!” Hay roared.
Claire could feel his fury, and such was the power of the coven’s Horned One over them that his congregation was ready to do murder without a single qualm. But in the moments it took them to rally themselves to do his bidding, Colin stepped forward, drawing his gun at last. As they surged toward the Black Altar, he fired toward the roof.
“Back!” he shouted.
They stopped where they stood, temporarily startled by the gun, and Claire saw Colin reach up to clutch at his chest with his free hand. She started toward him, then stopped as she heard a hideous howling from behind her. She turned, to see Hay advancing upon Brian menacingly, the Black Beast glaring out of the smoke-reddened eyes visible beneath the mask he wore.
But Brian was too furious to reckon the difference in their sizes—he grabbed the heavy carved mask of the Horned One and ripped it from Hay’s face …
And hit him with it.
The whole thing took only seconds. Hay fell backward, his mouth spraying blood, and hit the corner of the altar with an awful, final sound. By the time he stopped moving, no one in that room had any doubt that he was dead.
Someone screamed. Panic ripped through the room, borne on a wave of psychoactive drugs. Ritual ecstacy was transmuted into the mother of all bad trips in less than a heartbeat. People turned on—or to—one another blindly. Brian grabbed Sally in his arms, and Colin turned slowly toward them, gesturing with his gun. His face was grey with pain.
“Come on!” he shouted hoarsely, and began to push through the mob.
I spend too much time in sickrooms, Claire thought sourly. Thank God it wasn’t a stroke—thank God Brian’s a doctor—or Colin would be dead now.
Arkham General Hospital was a small rural hospital without a cardiac care wing; the doctors there had freely confessed that Colin would receive better care in Boston, and plans were being made now to fly him out.
They’d been at the police station, making their statements—carefully edited of anything that would sound impossible to mundane ears—when Colin had fainted. She’d known all day that he was in pain, and the diagnosis, from the symptoms, was pretty obvious. But there had been nothing they could do until Brian and Sally were free, and Claire hadn’t realized just how serious Colin’s illness was until he collapsed. The first thing Claire had feared was some kind of magickal backlash from the Antique Rite; a simple heart attack seemed wholesome and innocent next to the corruption they had faced together earlier that night. Fortunately he recovered enough to tell Brian his symptoms—and Brian had taken the trouble to retrieve his medical bag on the way to the police station.
“You’ve got to be on the lookout for this sort of thing when you get to be his jage,” one of the interns had said offhandedly when they got to the hospital. Colin had been admitted over his protests—Brian had been fiercely insistent—and Claire had stayed with him, watching over him as he slept.
By the next morning, the previous night seemed as much like a dream to Claire as it must to the surviving members of the coven—who were, reasonably enough, also at Arkham General. Matthew Hay was dead, and a woman named Tabitha Whitfield was under heavy sedation, but everyone else would recover in a day or so with no particular ill effects. Sally and Brian had shrugged the whole experience off with surprising speed, but Claire had seen behavior like that before. It was the mind’s attempt to cope with something it couldn’t understand by simply sweeping it aside. The two of them were already talking about getting married—but it was tacitly understood that Brian would have his rural medical practice somewhere else.
And now I’ve got to figure out some tactful way to tell Justin that he has nothing more to fear from the local coven.
“Can I come in?”
Claire jerked awake and realized she’d been dozing. Justin Moorcock stood in the doorway.
“Maybe I’d better come out,” she answered, and tiptoed past Colin’s bed out into the hall.
“It’s over, isn’t it?” Justin said simply.
“Yes,” Claire answered. “I don’t think there’ll be any more trouble now.” She could feel it in the air—though that might be no more than summer sunlight and wishful thinking. “What are you doing here, Justin?”
“Well, Rowan called last night to tell me she thought you were in trouble. You’ll say it’s silly, but her hunches always seem to be right. I phoned the sheriff’s station and the hospital, and figured I was just going to have to drive around until I found you, when the sheriff called back to say that Colin was in the hospital and you were staying with him. So I guess Rowan was wrong, for once.”
“Yes and no,” Claire said evasively. There are no secretes in the country, she reflected. She wondered what story was going around about last night’s events, or if everyone would decide simply to pretend nothing had happened. Nearly everyone in this part of the county was related to someone in the coven, after all.
“Is Colin all right? I figured it was better to wait until something closer to visiting hours to stop by, and I didn’t want to leave Grandpa alone in the house at night.”
Especially cvnsidering what might be trying to get in, Claire thought. “I’m glad you came, Justin. Colin … well, all the signs have been there for months, and like an utter fool I missed them all. Brian wants to transfer him to a hospital in Boston as soon as possible.”
“So you’ll be leaving then,” Justin said. “We’ll miss you. I’ll miss you.” He hesitated. “Are they all dead? Matthew Hay, and Witch-Sara and all?”
His tone was grave and serious. In his heart, Justin Moorcock believed in monsters. He’d grown up in Madison Corners, after all. He knew that shadows were more tenacious than light.
“Matthew Hay is dead, and I don’t think Sally Latimer is going to stay in this part of the country.” Not if she’s smart. “But I’d rather tell the story only once; I’ll need to pack up Colin’s things and then I’ll drive out to the farm and give you both the whole story.”
“You’d probably better call Rowan, too,” Justin said. “And I wish … well, I wish you’d had a better time here.”
“Oh, it had its moments,” Claire said, smiling.
INTERLUDE #8
AUGUST 1990
COLIN WAS IN THE HOSPITAL FOR SOME MONTHS AFTER THAT—first at Arkham General, then in Boston, and finally he was allowed to return home to a strict regimen of diet, medicine, and exercise. It seemed only reasonable that he should confine himself now more to the role of consultant, letting younger men and women bear the stress of confrontation with the Unseen.
But the doctors had called him, in simple obliviousness, something I had never before thought of him as being: an old man.
Yes, Colin was not young. He was seventy the year we smashed the Church of the Antique Rite, and had reached his biblical allotment of threescore and ten. But his life had never seemed to me to have anything of a completed quality. Somehow I imagined him still on the threshold of it, his greatest tasks unbegun.
That Colin felt something of the same sense I knew. Even at the end of this long career of service to the Light there was something more he needed to do, and as the shadows of his life’s twilight deepened, that undone task preyed upon his mind more and more.
TWENTY-FOUR
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1998
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
He was nearly eighty, and even by the most generous possible estimate had already lived far more years than he had left to live. The ebb and flow of world events took on a certain remoteness and inevitability from Colin’s hard-won new perspective. The time remaining to him was short, and more and more these days he realized how much he did not wish to leave behind him unfinished business when he left this life: to be called back to the Light with the weight of tasks undone and penances unpaid weighing him down.
Sometimes he wondered how a life could just rush past—it seemed as if he’d only paused for a moment to look back on what he’d already accomplished, and suddenly all his allotted years had fled. Time, as the cliché put it, marched on, and life turned out to be something lived in moments of inattention, while one’s thoughts were elsewhere.
The last decade had been filled with milestones, as if even history knew that the Western world was approaching the millennium and wished to get its housekeeping done. Sometimes he wondered what his younger self, unburdened by the weight of experience, would have thought of them. Things he would once have raged against he now accepted as being beyond his power to affect.
Two more wars—they didn’t even call them that anymore—and the two Germanies were reunited at last. The war Colin still thought of as “his” war was half a century in the past now, but the peace that should have been established through the Allied victory had never really come—the Pax Americana had been a cruel fraud, the full extent of its dishonesty slowly unfolding as the postwar decades passed. And now events had buried even those grave betrayals—and the shining moments of triumph—beneath the weight of sheer incident.
The Soviet Union had dissolved, seventy-five years after its birth, in a move almost completely unexpected by Cold Warriors and Soviet analysts in the West. There’d been new race riots here at home, as terrifying in their way as the Watts riots had been, and this time their violence was broadcast live, thanks to the new flexibility of television. In New York and Oklahoma City, the terrorist bombings that had been a feature of European life for so long finally reached American shores, and television had been there too, broadcasting pictures of the carnage before the first dust had settled.
When he’d made this last relocation—to what the younger generation called a “planned community”—Colin had gotten rid of his television set. He had always mistrusted its false intimacy, and what he saw through its medium had come to sadden him in a deep and inarticulate way. His generation had hoped for so much from television—the electronic global village—and instead television had become an ever-flowing conduit of inanity, of trivial concocted details that Colin found less and less important with each passing day.
Old friends had left him and new friendships were formed. Cassie Chandler had died tragically two years ago in a fire that had gutted the Ancient Mysteries Bookshop. The disaster had somehow seemed to sever Claire’s ties to the Bay Area for good. Over the years, her visits back East to her cousin’s farm in Massachusetts had slowly become more frequent, and lasted longer, until now her time was divided equally between Glastonbury and Madison Corners, with occasional trips back to the Bay Area. She wrote frequently, always urging Colin to visit the farm, but Colin doubted he would. For now, his work was here.
Caroline Jourdemayne had died in 1995, three years ago this month. A letter had come a few weeks later—written long before her death and left with her lawyer for just this event. She’d asked him to keep watch over her niece, but by the time Colin received Caroline’s letter, Truth was far beyond the help that Caroline had intended.
Truth had come to visit him a few months after the letter had reached him. Since he had last seen her, eight years before, she had embraced her father’s Path—there was so much of him in her now that it had been quite a wrench to see her again. It was almost as if Thorne Blackburn stood before him once more, with all their old quarrels about Light and Darkness unresolved.
But Colin was no longer the Sword of the Order and had not been for many years. And there must always be change. There must always be someone willing to try that which was perilous, that which had once been forbidden. Someone to venture into the lands beyond what was known to bring back information from the numinous place where imagination faltered. He was an old man—let him be the one to take the dangerous chance.
When Truth had asked if she could call on him, Colin had welcomed her—even though the life that he had spent in the service of the Light had been spent learning over and over again the harsh and bitter lesson of the dangers of the path of compromise. The worlds he and Truth had been born into were unimaginably different, but their fealty was to Knowledge and Service, however differently defined.
He had been able to do his small part to help Truth Jourdemayne along her path to understanding, but they both knew that her path was not his, nor could it ever be, so long as she held true to the oaths she had sworn. Much of what he had in him to tell was not for her to know, and Colin thought with grave serenity of the disciple to whom he must impart all that he had learned, the disciple he had not found in a lifetime of searching. Colin only hoped the Lords of Light would send someone to him soon, because there was much he must do to prepare for his own final exit.
He felt no fear of that inevitable future day—only a mild curiosity as to the mechanics of the event itself, and the anticipation of meeting old friends once more. But whatever the spirit in which he contemplated it, preparation for his own departure was sometimes a wearying task. There was a lifetime’s worth of research and memories to organize; he had donated many of his books and personal papers to the Bidney Institute before his last move, and more were earmarked to go there upon his death.
There would be time enough for that much. He knew it. But why did he feel there was so little time left for what mattered more?
“Colin! I rang the bell but there wasn’t any answer, so I thought I’d see if you were around back.”
Hunter Greyson pushed through the garden gate, his walking stick in his hand and his laptop slung over his shoulder. He didn’t need the cane as much these days—not after nearly two years of rigorous physical therapy—but the fearless recklessness of youth was gone in the accident that had claimed so many years of his life, replaced by the prudence of maturity.
Colin got to his feet and shook Grey’s hand. Grey’s reentry into Colin’s life was one of time’s great gifts; the chance to repair, or at least understand, the negligence and missteps of his younger days.
“I was just woolgathering. We’ll call it a privilege of age,” Colin said, smiling. “How are Winter and the baby?”
“Fine, both of them; Winter says you have to come to dinner again soon, but you already know that. And you’ve got to see Colleen—you won’t believe how she’s grown. I can’t believe it’s only been a year since she was born; she’s just so amazing.”
“A year—that means Truth and Dylan will be coming’up on their first anniversary soon,” Colin said.
“December twenty-first,” Grey said promptly. “Have to send them a card or something. It’s a wonder they haven’t killed each other yet, the way they knock heads.”
Colin and Grey had both attended the wedding held at Shadow’s Gate—Thorne’s estate was still a tangled mess, but Truth had finally begun to take steps to be legally declared Thome Blackburn’s daughter. It was at her wedding that Colin had met Grey once more.
“Have you heard from her lately? Is she having any luck with the search?” Colin asked.
At the same time she had taken steps to declare her own legitimacy, Truth had begun to search for her other half-siblings, but the quest for Thorne Blackburn’s missing children was a slow business, even in the modern cyberspace world where physical boundaries meant almost as little as they did in th
e Overlight.
“Not yet,” Grey said, shrugging. “Those records are buried pretty deep. Circle of Fire’s giving her all the help we can, of course, and so are the other Circles, but …” He sighed.
Colin knew—though they rarely discussed it these days—that Grey was still active in the Blackburn Work, doing his best to carry on Thorne’s willfully fragmented legacy. It was easier now that cyberspace had become the newest Aquarian frontier; the seekers who had once hunted in vain for their kindred now could form closely-knit communities bound together by phone lines and technology.
“It’s just so hard these days,” Grey said, sitting down. “Everybody wants a quick fix—become a master shaman in ten easy lessons, that sort of thing. It’s hard to find people willing to dedicate themselves to the Work—hell, I hear that even Holy Mother Church is having trouble getting enough nuns for the penguin suits. It’s not like it was in the olden days.”
“Times change,” Colin said. “I know it’s the custom now to romanticize the sixties, but they weren’t romantic while you were there, believe me. Most of my generation thought that the Communist were going to bomb us back into the Stone Age, and the kids on the streets thought their parents had all become Nazis.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Grey said, unconvinced. “But at least your generation worried about its problems. Nobody cares about much of anything today except getting by. At least in the sixties everyone knew where the boundaries were.”
“Even if they weren’t really there,” Colin said. “Come on, Grey—there’s no use putting it off much longer. The papers will still be there waiting for us, no matter what happens to the world.”
They went inside to Colin’s office, and for several hours the conversation was entirely about absent correspondents, missing letters, and all the exoteric paraphernalia of a life spent in exploration of the Unseen World. Grey had the training and background to make the work easy, knowing from his own experience what material could go to public collections, what could be donated but must still be restricted, and what should best be destroyed in the absence of a disciple to whom Colin could entrust it.