Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  There were some shouts of agreement, but most of the audience stirred uneasily. Without the microphone, all of them couldn't hear what was happening on stage, and the presence of the marshals made them uneasy. Colin could feel the violence in the air like the promise of a storm.

  "Well, the only difference your followers make is to your bank account, Blackburn!" Simon snarled. "They give you everything they have, and what do they get for it? Nothing!"

  "At least they get the chance to judge for themselves," Thorne shot back. "All you want is for them to follow you instead of me—isn't the concert hall applause enough anymore?"

  "All right, Mr. Blackburn. You're going to have to come along with us," one of the marshals said, stepping up onto the stage.

  Colin could see by the expression on Simon's face that he hadn't meant things to go quite this far. "I've got to stop this before Thorne starts a riot," Colin said to Claire. He began pushing his way closer toward the stage.

  The crowd, roused to the edge of hysteria by Thorne only moments before, was becoming increasingly agitated by the disruption, and there were growing catcalls directed at Simon.

  "Judge for themselves? That's rich!" Simon shouted. "What can they judge when all you're giving them is lies and tricks and empty promises? I'm not the one telling people that I'm the son of a god!"

  "Looks like you think actions speak louder than words," Thorne cooed mockingly into another microphone.

  Laughter.

  Thorne backed away from the marshal who was climbing up on the stage. By now Colin had reached the edge of the platform, and was working his way around to the steps.

  "Yes," said Simon doggedly from below, "I do. If you've got the godlike powers you claim, Blackburn, why not make the restraining order go away? Turn me into a frog? Something?"

  The day that had been so bright only moments ago was dimming, clouding over as clouds came boiling in off the San Gabriel Mountains to shroud the day in dim light that looked as if it had been filtered through soft cheesecloth.

  "I try never to improve on Nature's handiwork," Thorne snapped. The marshal reached him, and there was a brief struggle as Thorne tried to shake him off. The man pulled out his cuffs. Colin climbed up on stage and headed toward him. In another moment the crowd would rush the stage, and people would get hurt.

  "There's no need for this," Colin said quietly to the officer. "If this is a legitimate restraining order, I'm sure Mr. Blackburn will comply."

  "Et tu, Colin?" Thorne said, staring at Colin over the marshal's shoulder. The marshal stepped back without cuffing Thorne.

  "Don't start trying to overawe me; I've had a classical education, too," Colin said sharply. He was more irritated—and yes, frightened—than he'd thought by Thorne's parading of the robes he no longer had the right to wear and his easy appropriation of the energy of the mob.

  "Simon, what did you think you were accomplishing here?" Colin demanded, turning away and looking down at Simon Anstey.

  "I'm tired of watching this mountebank ruin everything Alison and I are working for!" Simon shot back, climbing up on the stage as well. "How can parapsychology be accepted as a legitimate field of research while he's turning the occult into a sideshow?"

  "It is a sideshow," Thorne said quietly, stepping away from the marshal. "That's the point."

  "No," said Colin, abruptly goaded beyond endurance. "It's what each of us makes it. You could have made it into something good, something fine—you could have been the gateway through which new seekers could approach the Ancient Mysteries—"

  "Ancient boondoggle!" Thorne shouted, lunging toward the front of the stage again. His horned crown was wildly askew, and Thorne wrenched it off and flung it out into the crowd. "Give in—give up—submit— Forget it! Mankind has the power of the gods, and it's time it was used to do more than spin prayer wheels—"

  "Either shut your face and pack it in or you're going out of here in cuffs. Mike! Get these people moving!" the marshal on stage barked.

  Thorne shrugged, seeming to surrender all at once. He started to pull off his robes. Thorne looked at Colin.

  "You attack everything I believe in," Colin said, answering the unspoken plea, "and then expect to trade on the very qualities you despise the moment you get into trouble. I can't help you this time, Thorne."

  "Go on, then," Thorne said. "Go on back to your precious, safe, tame, white light. Only you're wrong about it being a Path—it's a dead end. Come on, boys and girls," Thorne called to the audience, holding out his hands for their attention. "Today the pigs win—tomorrow we win. Let's all go quietly; they're scared enough of us as it is."

  It was only later that Colin realized why Claire's Gift had sent her to the festival that day. She had not come for Thorne Blackburn. She'd come for him.

  INTERLUDE #4

  JUNE 1967

  THORNE AND COLIN SAW VERY LITTLE OF EACH OTHER AFTER THAT DAY. IT was as if Thorne had given up on Colin and decided he was no longer worth his time—and in practical terms, their paths had diverged to the point that Colin could no longer overlook the things Thorne was advocating.

  A few weeks after the fight in the park, Simon got at least part of his wish. Thorne left on the Universal Mystery Tour—a six-week extravaganza of peace, rock and roll, and magick—both stage illusionism and the truer sort. After that, Thorne was truly a national celebrity, as that time understood the word—and so, being Thorne, he decided to disappear almost completely from public life. He'd managed—somehow—to amass a sizeable personal fortune, and used part of it to purchase an estate in upstate New York called Shadow's Gate.

  After that June day in the park, I never saw Thorne Blackburn alive again. But before I received word of his death, I was to experience a far more personal bereavement. . . .

  EIGHT

  BERKELEY, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1968

  He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain. — PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  1968 WAS A YEAR DEFINED BY VIOLENCE AND DEATH. BEFORE IT WAS OVER, two assassinations had forever changed the tone of American political life: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. The two men were killed barely eight weeks apart, and in the wake of the second murder, the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago took on a surreal, apocalyptic importance: seen by the Right as an extension of the animal savagery that had coopted the political process, and by the Left as a confirmation of the view that America had become a brutal police state.

  The trial of the Chicago Seven that followed became a media circus; a carnival sideshow where Image cast out Truth and Justice was not blind, but mad. . . .

  They'd bought the little stucco bungalow four years ago, when Peter had been promoted. They'd been so happy the day they'd finally moved in—a real home at last. Sometimes it seemed to Claire that she could still feel that joy, as if it had been recorded by the very bones of the house and echoed, like old music, through its rooms.

  She'd been determined to make their home everything her own had never been; sometimes Peter laughed at her for the fierceness of that determination, but his mother never did. Elisabeth Moffat understood her daughter-in-law with that wordless communion that makes two strangers heartfelt friends in the space of an instant. She had made a place for Claire in her heart and her family with a simple grace that Claire often felt was the single greatest miracle she had ever been gifted with. Under her mother-in-law's tutelage, the little tract house had become a home. For two, and, perhaps, someday—for three.

  Claire knew that Peter wanted a family; she had held back from the idea, afraid that she would only recreate her own childhood hell for a child of her own. It had been a long time before that fear had quieted, and Claire knew that it would never really go away. But with Peter and his mother to help her, she had slowly become confident—if not of her success at motherhood, at least that her mistakes would not be intolerable ones. That spring, she had begun to try to become pregnant.

  The dre
ams had started then.

  At first she thought they were simple anxiety. In the wake of his break with Thorne, Colin had gone back to the East Coast. A friend had offered him a position with Selkie Press, a publishing house that specialized in parapsychological and occult subjects, and Colin, increasingly at odds with the Rhodes Group's policy of conciliation and concealment, had accepted the offer.

  But while Claire knew that she would miss Colin—as a friend, and one who understood her faults far better than Peter ever would—she did not think that she was so dependent upon him as to be sunk in terror by his absence. He was, after all, only a phone call away.

  Yet she still dreamed.

  They began as simply hints—a disquiet spilling over into her other dreams. Later came the images—of herself, running through fog, crying out for the return of... something. There was loss in those dreams, loss deep and wounding.

  She knew what it was.

  Each time the knowledge surfaced, Claire rejected it. It was not true. It was some sick, inverted wish fulfillment. Or just this once, her Gift was playing her false, tainted because she was tainted by the unearned guilt of her childhood upbringing.

  In her heart she knew that none of these explanations was true. The dream continued, month after month, until half a year had passed. She told no one, but in her mind the unheld conversations echoed. Claire, why didn't you tell me? Colin's voice.

  And her own, in answer: How could I? If I tell no one, I can still hope that I'm wrong. And if I tell you, I have to tell him, or it becomes a secret that I'm keeping from him, and I cannot bear that. Who can I tell, without telling him?

  No one.

  When she was still very young, Claire had become an expert at dissembling; hiding the unwanted truths far away and presenting an unruffled, cream-smooth face to the world. Now she resurrected all the skills she thought she no longer had need of, using them to bury the truth deep and pretend that everything was normal. And she managed to fool even herself, except when she dreamed.

  When her dreams woke her, Claire would slip quietly from their conjugal bed, huddling in the kitchen over a cup of tea and trying to imagine how to keep Peter safe. She could not warn him. There was nothing to warn him about—only her frightening sense of loss. She had known the work he did before they married. She had always known that it was dangerous, and that he loved it too much to easily give it up. Telling him that she was afraid would not armor him against the danger. It would only be a useless cruelty.

  And so Claire kept her own counsel, her mind partitioned into shapeless dread and willful ignorance.

  Until one day she could be ignorant no longer.

  It was September 16, a Monday. Peter was working the evening shift, three to eight. Claire was home, fixing dinner, to the sounds of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in the background.

  For the last several years she had listed with a temporary agency—there was always work for someone with an RN degree who was willing to fill in here and there—but once the meaning of her premonitory dreams had become unmistakable, she'd worked less and less. She'd begun dreading having to leave the house for any reason, as if the act of staying home could provide some sort of bulwark against what was to come.

  Most of the time she kept busy, but lately, each night around seven o'clock, she began to watch the time. And when eight o'clock had come and gone she breathed a prayer of thanksgiving, even though Peter would not be home for another hour. At eight o'clock his shift was over, and Peter was safe for another day. She could go on with her life then, and by the time he arrived home she could greet him as if nothing were amiss.

  It was 8:45. She was in the kitchen, cooking dinner. She'd shifted her schedule to match his, so they ate at quite a continental hour. There was a ham baking in the oven; Peter's favorite. It would be years to come before she could smell ham without feeling nauseated.

  She was filling a saucepan at the tap and turned to place it on the stove. And then, in an instant, her world fell away.

  She was lying on the ground, in the dark. Above her, she could see the bright lights of the convenience store a few blocks from their house.

  There was no pain. Only cold, and wet, and a vast calm, knowing that death had come, and that now everything stopped.

  "Peter!"

  The sound the saucepan made as it hit the linoleum brought Claire back to the world. There was water all over the floor, but she did not stop to mop it up. She grabbed her car keys and ran for the door.

  She knew where he was. She would have known even if the ties that bound them hadn't drawn her to the little shopping plaza less than fifteen minutes from their house. She had no memory of the drive, only of the moment when she turned the corner and saw the two patrol cars parked in the lot.

  "Hey, lady—oh, Jesus, it's Claire—honey, don't—" The words went by her meaninglessly; she tore at the hands restraining her until they let her go.

  They'd covered Peter with a blanket out of the back of one of the patrol units; impatient, she pulled it away, kneeling beside him. The ground was slippery and wet, and just then she didn't understand why. Why had they covered his face?

  "Peter?" Claire whispered. She reached for his hand, her fingers closing over the pulse-point in an automatic nurse's gesture. But she was too late. The hand was cold and lifeless in hers. He was already gone.

  It isn't fair. It isn't fair—he wasn't even on duty. How could somebody shoot him when he wasn't even on duty. . . .

  Nothing mattered then. Later they would tell her the whole story—a hold-up, a sawed-off shotgun. They would assure her that Peter's death had been merciful, painless, and quick. They would tell her that her husband died a hero. None of that mattered now. All that mattered was the realization that with her husband dead, she must be the one to go and tell his mother.

  One of the uniformed officers drove Claire to Mrs. Moffat's house. He'd wanted to drive her home, but Claire had been firm. She felt an urgent need to tell this news at once, as if by waiting it could somehow become worse. She knew that her calmness was an illusion wrought by paralyzing emotional trauma. She knew that it might be kinder to wait, to break the news to Mrs. Moffat in daylight. But in some part of Claire's heart the irrational conviction survived that somehow Peter's death was not real, that Elisabeth Moffat would have some secret magic that could make the bad news go away.

  The car pulled into the driveway.

  "Claire, why don't you wait here and—"

  "Don't be silly, Steve," Claire said. Her words had the blunt cruelty of shock. "It won't get any easier for me if I don't hear the words. I already know that Peter's dead."

  She yanked open the door and swung out of the car.

  Peter's mother knew before Claire said a word. What member of a policeman's family would think anything else, when a uniformed officer appeared at her door in the middle of the night?

  Only later did it occur to Claire that she must have looked like the Angel of Death herself. She'd wiped off the worst of the blood on the drive over, but her legs were still smeared with it.

  Steve said everything that was proper, but Claire could tell that he was grateful when his partner pulled up at the curb a few minutes later and he could leave. She knew that he could imagine too vividly that it could have been him lying in that parking lot. It could have been any of them.

  "I'm so sorry. Oh, Claire, my dear girl, I'd hoped this would never happen to you," Elisabeth Moffat said.

  Why are you so worried? Claire wondered, faintly puzzled. Peter is dead. There's nothing more we can do. There's nothing to worry about. And deep inside, she felt a sense of relief that the waiting was over, and pride that Peter had never known what it was she waited for, all those long weeks.

  "It's all right," she said meaninglessly. Unheeded tears rose up in her eyes; for a moment she could not understand why her vision had blurred, then she blinked them away. "Why don't I make us a nice cup of tea? And then I suppose we need to think about what to do."

  Not th
at it mattered. Not that anything mattered, or would matter again for a very long time.

  The funeral was the following Monday, and in defiance of everything seemly, it was a beautiful day. The sky was cloudlessly blue, the sunlight was golden, and the air was summer-hot. The gravestones and tall monuments were brilliantly white.

  The department turned out in force for the funeral, of course. Peter had been well liked. The minister from their church conducted the service; there was no need for Peter to be laid to rest by the words of strangers who had never known him.

  Colin had come, thank God. Claire did not think she could have stood it otherwise. Elisabeth was steadfast, calm and composed, but now she had buried both her men, husband and son, and the strain of it etched stark lines into her face. Elisabeth Moffat had always seemed an incorruptible rock, but she seemed to have aged twenty years overnight, and Claire feared for her well-being. For herself, she feared nothing. She did not think she would feel anything, ever again. That part of her had died with Peter, killed as surely as a summer rose withered in an early frost.

  Some part of her knew that she would live past this moment, that time, if nothing else, would numb the insistent pain of this amputation and teach her to find life good again. And so she would—even in the shock of her first grief Claire knew that—but the reckless merry part of her that Peter had opened to joy was gone forever.

  "Claire."

  The graveside service was over, and everyone else was gone, but Claire couldn't bring herself to leave. Terrible as this moment was, she clung to it, because when it was over, her life without Peter would begin.

  "Colin. A fine hello this is," she managed to say.

  "I wasn't expecting dancing girls, all things considered. I know it sounds trite and superficial, but if there's anything I can do—"