“That’s enough for today,” Colin said firmly as the light began to fail. “And Winter will have my head if I tire you out.” He sat back on the couch, sighing.
Grey got up and stretched, turning on the lights, and looked down at the day’s work.
“Now this deserves a special glass case at the institute,” Grey said, picking up the paperweight Alison had given Colin so long ago. “‘Whosoever draws this sword is rightwise king of all England’ and all that.” He slipped the little silver letter opener from its place in the anvil and brandished it a moment before sliding it back and placing the paperweight on the windowsill.
“Not me, though. I’m busy enough as it is. In fact, I meant to tell you, I’m going to have to miss next week,” Grey said. “Circle of Fire’s getting ready for Samhain; we’re going to throw a big whoop-de-do with a bunch of the other Circles, and there’s so much work to get done. Permits, licenses, all that kind of thing.”
“I hope you have better luck with them than Thorne ever did,” Colin answered, and for the first time in many years, the old memories did not bring pain.
Grey only laughed.
Grey had been gone less than ten minutes when the phone rang. Colin picked it up, cutting the answering machine off in midmessage; it was probably just Winter calling, wondering where her husband was.
“Hello?”
“Colin? It’s Dylan.”
“Dylan,” Colin said, glancing at the clock on the sill next to Alison’s paperweight. Five o’clock—that meant eight P.M. back in New York; Dylan should be at home. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, nothing really,” Dylan said, so off-handedly that Colin became instantly alert. “I was just … you remember Rowan Moorcock, don’t you?”
Yes, he remembered Rowan. Claire’s cousin had been at Truth’s wedding. She’d changed since Colin had first met her, and now seemed to represent the worst of the “bubble-gum occultism” that had come out of the Aquarian Age: the frivolous, superficial approach to the ancient mysteries that Grey had been bemoaning earlier.
“Yes …” Colin said slowly. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes. No. That is, I’m not really certain myself,” Dylan said slowly.
“That seems to just about cover everything,” Colin said, the cold certainty of trouble growing in his stomach with every word Dylan spoke. “But I’m sure you didn’t call at this hour just to discuss one of your students.” Surely Rowan would have finished at Taghkanic by now? But it was hard to tell with postgraduate studies.
“Well, Rowan’s doing her doctoral work here …” Dylan said. His very unwillingness to put his fears into words somehow made them seem all the more real. “And with one thing and another, I don’t see as much of her now as I used to. I’ve been pretty busy this summer, what with working on that mess up at Frosthythe and getting Truth off to England to meet the Thornes, and I suppose I just lost track of what she was doing. Rowan, I mean.”
Colin waited, half-expecting Dylan to simply hang up; he sounded that much like a man distracted past all sense.
“She’s disappeared,” Dylan finally said. “I don’t know where she is and I think she’s in over her head.”
“You’ve mentioned this to her father?” Colin asked.
“What could I do except worry him?” Dylan demanded in frustrated tones. “She hasn’t been back to her apartment in a month, she hasn’t checked her e-mail … what am I supposed to do, Colin?”
“You could start,” Colin said, as quietly as possible, “with telling me why you’ve called me instead of the police.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line.
“Because they won’t understand,” Dylan said, an impatience like anger in his voice. “I know she’s in trouble, but there’s no way I could explain it to someone who …”
There was another pause; Colin heard Dylan sigh.
“I’d hoped …I hope you can tell me where to start looking,” he said. “I’m not sure where to begin. Have you ever heard of something called the Thule Group?”
The room grew dim as Dylan spoke. “It was supposed to be a historical research project. In the simplest terms, the Thule Group’s supposed to be a German secret society founded in the early twentieth century by Guido von List; Thule is supposed to be the ancient German homeland, and all that. Under Lanz von Liebenfels, von List’s successor, there’s some evidence that the Thule Group—or Armanenschaft, as a number of scholars use the terms almost interchangeably—formed a second order which became the Brownshirts who were instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power.
“After the war, of course, all sorts of rumors grew up around it, including the urban folklore that Hitler had himself been a member of one of the Thule Lodges, and that the entire Holocaust had been planned and performed under orders from his occult superiors. Of course, if it ever had existed, it must have been destroyed by Hitler’s own purges of the occult Lodges in the thirties and forties,” Dylan said.
“I think you know that isn’t true, Dylan,” Colin said, rousing himself to speech with an effort. There was no point in letting Dylan go on telling him things he already knew far too well out of sheer nerves. “Whatever the Thule Group originally was, it later became a part of the Ahnenerβe, and it survived the fall of Berlin essentially intact, just as so much of the Nazi power structure did.”
Through the connection Colin could almost hear the disbelief, the resistance to what he said.
“That’s over fifty years ago. Even if some of them survived, surely they simply disbanded. What was there left for them to work for? They’d lost the war … .”
“Sometimes I wonder if that war ever really ended,” Colin said, half to himself. “Believe me, Dylan: the Lodge—the original Lodge, the one directly descended from the one List founded—survives today. And it’s still fighting for the goals of the Third Reich. Now tell me—how is Rowan involved?”
“Her dissertation topic was ‘The Evolution of Trance Mediumship as an Instrument of Nazi Theocracy.”’ Dylan took a deep breath, as if wondering how best to go on.
Colin waited, gripping the phone tightly, as if he thought it might try to get away.
“Well, almost immediately she turned up the contemporary would-be Thulists—the groups that date back to the sixties and later—the mystical branch of the Klan; various kinds of back-engineered neo-Nazi nonsense. And I told her to stay completely away from them. They’re nothing but bad news—and more to the point for Rowan’s purposes, they’re neo-Nazi, and have nothing to do with the Third Reich … .”
Get on with it, Colin urged mentally, but he could sense that there was information that Dylan could simply not bring himself to reveal over the phone.
“So you told her to drop it. And naturally she did what you said,” Colin said neutrally.
But if she had why would you have called me?
Dylan met him at the small local airport. The drive back to Glastonbury passed in uncharacteristic silence; Colin was occupied with his own thoughts. It was impossible to reconcile the sassy, bouncy, young woman he’d seen at Dylan’s wedding last year with someone motivated and willing to go into battle against monsters whose supposed defeat lay half a century in her past.
If, in fact, that had been what she was doing. If she’d taken her work seriously enough to know how dangerous—how real—those monsters could be.
Colin prayed that she understood the stakes of the game she’d been playing. For her own sake.
The apartment was located over a shop in downtown Glastonbury, only a block or two away from Inquire Within. While he was opening the door, Dylan explained—again—that Rowan had left her keys with a student named Val Graves whom she’d hired to look after her plants and bring in her mail. Rowan had paid Val for three months—in advance.
So she intended to disappear. Is that a good sign? I hope to Heaven it is.
Colin looked around the apartment, hoping to find some clue that Dylan had missed. It was a typical stude
nt apartment, though Rowan had long since moved out of student housing; the only item that looked as if it had been bought new was the stereo.
The uncurtained window overlooking the street was filled with plants; some hanging, some on shelves. All looked lush and cared-for. Framed posters covered the walls—most of them in the wearily realistic style of modern fantasy art: dragons, knights, tough-looking young women in tattoos and leather. There was a bowlful of multisided dice on the bookcase next to the stereo; Rowan Moorcock, it appeared, was an aficionado of the dice-driven role-playing games that had become most people’s modern metaphor for magick and the Unseen World.
Despite the messy disorder of the living room, it did not seem to have been searched. They haven’t backtracked her here, then, Colin thought. Or perhaps they didn’t need to.
Dylan was leafing through the pile of unopened mail on the corner of the couch, oblivious to Colin.
“Let’s go over it again, Dylan,” Colin said. “You told me that Rowan had chosen the Thule Gesellschaft for her dissertation topic. Now she’s gone. And she didn’t say where she was going?” Colin asked. “You’ve checked with her friends?”
“Nobody knows where she is,” Dylan repeated doggedly. “She didn’t say anything to Val—the kid she asked to take care of her apartment. Just handed over the money and said she might be in and out.”
“that did Truth make of all this?” Colin asked. Though her path was not quite his own, Truth was a magician of considerable power, and her insight would be helpful.
“I haven’t told her,” Dylan admitted reluctantly. “She’s still in England—I don’t know what she can do from there and I didn’t want to call her back … .” Dylan hesitated, his unspoken dilemma plain. Truth might be able to help, but to call her back would be inevitably to involve her in the same danger he feared Rowan had fallen into. But not to call her would be to do less than was possible to save Rowan. He understood Dylan’s reluctance far better than Dylan might ever realize—either course of action led to jeopardy, not for himself, but for someone he loved. How could an ethical man choose who to risk?
“Bills … checks—she wouldn’t have just gone off and left all this stuff.” Dylan ran a hand distractedly through his hair. There were dark smudges of sleeplessness beneath his blue eyes. “Dylan,” Colin said, a slight edge to his voice.
Dylan looked up at him, his expression that of a man fighting—and failing—to disbelieve in the fact that something had gone horribly wrong. His shoulders slumped as he surrendered.
“This spring—May? June?—Miles got a string of odd phone calls: people asking questions about Rowan and being very mysterious when he asked questions back. Not just one person, either, but several different people over a period of weeks. He talked to me about it—I even called one of them. He said he was doing a background check on Rowan in connection with an employment interview.” Dylan grimaced. If he’d ever believed the unknown man’s explanation, he no longer did.
“Do you remember any names?” Colin asked.
Dylan shrugged. “I think I made notes; I’ll see if I can dig them up. Of course neither Miles nor I gave out any information, but the whole thing was just weird enough that I braced Rowan with it. She got very upset and admitted that she’d been getting involved with what I gathered at the time were some of the less-savory modern secret societies.” Dylan closed his eyes for a moment, and tossed the envelopes back on the couch as if they no longer mattered.
“Colin, I could have strangled her on the spot, I swear it. I demanded that she ditch the Thulists and choose a new topic for her thesis—I swore I’d kick her out of the program, get her blacklisted in the field if she went on meddling with that stuff. She told me she’d gotten in over her head and all that and had learned better. She picked a new subject for her thesis—that’s what I thought she’d sent in—but when I read it, it wasn’t about trance psychism in nineteenth-century America. It was this.”
Dylan opened his briefcase and dropped a thick spiral-bound manuscript onto the couch. This, then, was what Dylan had not been able to bring himself to talk about on the phone, the thing that had frightened him enough to call Colin in.
Colin picked it up. The pages inside the cardboard covers crackled mutely in his hands as if they were erasable bond. Colin opened the front cover and flipped to the first page. The surface was faintly wavy, as if the paper had been damp at some point, and here and there the letters were blurred.
Ultima Thule: The Thousand-Year Reich and the Corruption of the American Dream.
She knows. The cold pain in his chest had nothing to do with physical weakness and everything to do with fear. It was as if his deepest nightmares had been placed into print—and another innocent was poised for sacrifice.
“Not trance psychism,” Colin observed evenly.
“I saw that title, and that was when I went looking for Rowan—and didn’t find her,” Dylan said. “Though I suppose it’s just as well—I don’t know what I would have done, I was so worried about what she’d gotten into. But I kept looking, and after a while I realized that nobody had seen her for weeks. And then I sat down and read what she’d written—and at that point I panicked and called you.”
“Not an unreasonable reaction, all things considered,” Colin said. “You’re one of the few people alive who know something of the work I did in the forties.”
“This is … bad,” Dylan said inadequately, sitting down on the couch and putting his head in his hands.
Colin looked down at him pityingly for a moment before walking into the tiny kitchen alcove. Something was nagging at the back of his mind; best to try to ignore it and let it surface as it would. Rowan had found her way into the shadow-world of Nazi occultism—and had developed, Colin was starting to believe, a healthy fear of her subject. But she’d persisted in her investigations, and now she was gone.
Where? And was she still alive?
He poked around the kitchen absently. The refrigerator was empty of perishables—a lonely bottle of lemon juice shared the shelves with a jar of pickles and a box of Parmesan cheese. The note from Rowan instructing her apartment-sitter to take the other things away was still stuck to the freezer with a magnet in the shape of a wizard-costumed teddy bear.
She’d had the time to make arrangements to disappear, but the fact that the apartment had not been ransacked worried Colin. If the people she feared were still looking for her, surely they would have come here to try to pick up leads, just as Colin had?
Or was it no longer necessary for them to do so?
Colin opened the freezer, and found it stocked with the usual things one might expect to find in a freezer—no meat, but a wide array of frozen vegetables and grains and a half-finished carton of Breyer’s ice cream.
“What are you doing? She isn’t hiding in the refrigerator,” Dylan said, following him into the kitchen.
“You called me because you wanted my help,” Colin said shortly, closing the freezer. “Now let me work.”
He sifted the known facts through his mind once more, as if they could produce new information. She found what she was looking for—the Thule Group. And they found her—checked up on her, either following references she’d given them or backtracking her themselves. She knew they were after her when she decided to disappear. Did she realize how far they were willing to go?
He had to assume so—and assume, too, that she had not simply fled to the imagined safety of home. The care she had taken to keep her departure a mystery encouraged Colin to believe she had. For if she had not, Claire and Justin were in deadly danger as well.
A cursory examination of the kitchen shelves revealed nothing out of the ordinary, and the bathroom contained nothing that a healthy young woman might not own. Nothing in either room had been disturbed, so far as Colin could tell.
He walked into the bedroom.
The first thing he saw was Rowan’s altar in the corner of the room. Four items lay on a white cloth. The water in the offering bowl was
long evaporated, the rose petals that had floated on its surface dried to a brown film at the bottom. The matching dish still contained a mixture of rock salt and quartz pebbles, representing alchemical Earth. The only other items on the small table were a covered incense burner and an oil lamp. Hanging over the altar in the aspect of an icon was a framed print of one of the Hubble photos: a glorious nebula, tinged with shades of gold, fuchsia, and vermilion. There was nothing else on, around, or under the altar.
The books in this room were far less innocuous than those in the living room. Colin recognized several titles from his own library: the Kybalion, the Arbatel, an edition of the Tesoraria d’Oro.
A copy of Mein Kampf. Colin picked it up, paging through it. The book had been heavily underlined and annotated.
“Is this her handwriting?” Colin asked, handing it to Dylan.
“Yes,” Dylan said, barely looking. “Look, Colin, I know I shouldn’t have called you. You’ve got to take it easy these days—Claire would kill me if anything happened to you. But if you have any idea of where I can start looking—”
“Not yet,” Colin said shortly. The comment about his health—justified as it was—irritated him. His life was not so precious to him that he would choose to preserve it rather than to help where help was needed. All men died in their time.
He sat down on the bed and pulled out the drawer of the file cabinet that served Rowan as a bedside table. The bottom drawer was filled with folders that had names like “World Church of the Creator” and “White Aryan Resistance”—all of which apparently indicated dead ends in her research. A folder marked “Thule Society” contained only the familiar—and scanty—historical references from the standard texts, copied and heavily underlined and annotated with Rowan’s cryptic marginal notes.
Heartlight Page 54