Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  "Not unless you can resurrect the dead," Claire shot back before she could stop herself. "I'm sorry, Colin. That was unworthy. This isn't your fault. It isn't anybody's fault—except that little bastard with the shotgun, and they've picked him up." She rubbed her eyes tiredly. They were dry, but only because she had cried so much already. "So there's a happy ending after all, isn't there?"

  "I don't think anyone can claim to be that detached," Colin said. He put an arm around her shoulder. "And anyone who tries to tell you that this is all for the best is a coward and a sadist."

  Claire rubbed at her eyes. "I suppose I ought to cry, but I'm just too tired. Everything seems so pointless, somehow. I know its just shock, but—" She shook her head.

  They turned and began to walk back to the car.

  " 'But' nothing," Colin said firmly. "You've suffered a grave loss. Take the time to grieve before trying to get on with things. Peter was a good man. We will all miss him."

  "But it didn't help, did it, Colin? Being good, or ... anything. He still died, didn't he? So what's the point? What's the point of doing anything?"

  Colin had no answers for her.

  NINE

  NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 1969

  Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand.

  — ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  "THE SUN! COMES THE SUN/ BY OAK AND ASH AND THORN, THE SUN.' COMES THE sun!"

  He was in some kind of temple, but he had never seen its like. Not dedicated to the Light, nor yet tainted by service to the Great Dragon. Not Black, not White—but Grey, grey as mist. . . .

  "The sun is coming up from the South!" cried the red-robed woman. "I call thee: Abraxas, Metatron, Uranos—"

  The ancient Names echoed through the temple. Twelve great stones set in a ring, and where the thirteenth should have been a great oak, its bark grey with weather and age. The trunk split, and out of it stepped a Horned Man.

  There was a woman clothed in the sun; she stepped from the shadow of the red-robed Caller to greet the Lord of the Oak. "Come, the Opener of the Way," she said.

  "By Abbadon! Meggido! Typhon! Set!" cried the red-robed woman. "Open now, open now the Way!"

  But instead the Serpent raised its head, coiling over the three of them, dragging them down into the Great Darkness as the church bells rang.

  And rang. . . and rang. . . .

  Ringing . . .

  His hand found the cold plastic of the receiver and lifted.

  "Colin? Colin, is that you? Please, Colin, are you there?"

  The words spilling out of the telephone in the dark were frantic, mixing disorientingly with the dispelling mists of sleep in Colin MacLaren's mind.

  "Yes, yes I'm here. Give me a minute."

  He sat up, still clutching the receiver, and groped for the switch on his bedside lamp. Outside the window he could hear the hiss of traffic on the rainy streets outside his first floor right apartment. April in New York meant inclement weather, and a proper spring storm was battering at the windows of the old brownstone. The lights shining from the street made each separate droplet on the glass into a tiny crystal prism.

  Finally he found the switch and turned on the light. Instantly the room shrank to its daylight contours and he felt more awake.

  "Colin—" the voice keened through the open line, and finally he recognized it.

  "Caroline? Caro, is that you?"

  Caroline Jourdemayne was Katherine's twin sister; she worked as a librarian in a little town called Rock Creek far up the Hudson in Amsterdam County.

  "Yes! Oh, Colin—I didn't know who else to call, and— There are police everywhere, and I don't know what to do. There's been a terrible accident—"

  "Calm down, Caroline. Of course I'll come. I'll be there as soon as I can. Where are you?"

  "Thorne's place. Shadow's Gate. It's in Shadowkill—you just take the Taconic north to Dutchess, then take 43 to 13. Please hurry, Colin!" He could hear the tears in Caroline's voice, the terror that she tried so hard to hold at bay.

  "Caroline, what's—" Colin started to say. But the line went dead.

  A peal of thunder echoed through the sky, and the lights flickered; reason enough for the connection to have been broken without him needing to think up any darker explanation for it. Fortunately the service was still fine at this end. Colin sighed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He pulled the phone over to him and dialed another number. He glanced at his watch. Three A.M. Colin groaned quietly, listening to the distant ringing through the receiver. A hellish hour at which to have to awaken someone.

  But his fears were groundless; Claire wasn't home. When her mother-in-law's death—of a stroke—had come only weeks after Peter's murder, Claire had wanted a complete change of scene, and had accepted Colin's suggestion of a move to New York. He'd been worried, when the double tragedy had struck, that Claire would not survive it. Her initial flight from everything she'd known, the violent rejection of her old life and all connected with it, could have been the start of a downward spiral, but Claire had pulled herself together and painstakingly rebuilt her life again. Never, even in her darkest moments, had she rejected the promptings of the Gift that infallibly led her to the side of people in trouble.

  Colin sighed again, then got up to dress. He would have liked to have had her with him, but she was working as a private duty nurse these days and spent many nights away from home. He'd phone her again from the road if opportunity presented itself, otherwise, he could phone from Shadow's Gate.

  Cornby's Garage, where Colin kept his car, was just around the corner, and the walk finished the job of waking him. By three-thirty he was on the road, heading north.

  He'd never been to Shadow's Gate, Thorne's magickal Elysium, before. Their friendship had cooled a great deal since that day in the park, but the terms on which he and Thorne had separated hardly mattered. Caroline had appealed to him for help, and she would have all the help Colin had to give.

  He called again from the road. The phone lines were still down at the house, and Claire still wasn't home—and even if she had been, it was a bit over two hours from Manhattan to Shadowkill. By the time she could get here, the crisis would be over, so Colin hoped. He dreaded to think what he'd find by the time he reached Shadow's Gate.

  All that he knew of Thorne's current activities came from seeing Thorne on Johnny Carson last fall along with millions of other Americans. Thorne had been wearing a silver headband set with moonstones, a pair of python-skin jeans, and sunglasses which he'd refused to remove all the time he was on. He'd talked about purchasing a magickal retreat, where he and his followers hoped to engage in cutting-edge research into the nature of human reality.

  Whatever exploitation Thorne was engaged in these days, it seemed to be doing well for him. He'd looked sleek and prosperous, a far cry from the scruffy and far-out idealist that Colin had met in what now seemed like another lifetime.

  The sky was lightening with the first rays of dawn by the time he reached Shadow's Gate, and the storm had blown over, leaving the sky scrubbed and clear, filled with the last faint stars of morning. The gatehouse of Thorne's estate was already barricaded by state and local police, two cars drawn across the entrance, lights flashing.

  "Sorry, mister. Nobody's allowed in." The state trooper, faceless beneath his broad-brimmed hat, leaned into Colin's car.

  "My name is Colin MacLaren," Colin said. "I'm a friend of the family." Fortunately, Colin had continued to work with the police when he'd relocated to New York; he pulled out Martin Becket's card and offered it to the patrolman.

  "You can check my bona fides with Martin, if you like. His home number's on the back." Detective Lieutenant Becket headed up NYPD's informal Occult Crimes Unit, and he and Colin had worked together more than once.

  "May I take this for a moment, sir?" The statie's manner was a little more respectful. He walked away, and returned with a quiet man in a gre
y suit and hat who might as well have been wearing the letters "FBI" embroidered on his suit pocket. Colin's heart sank. What kind of trouble had Thorne gotten himself into now? Drugs?

  But Caroline had known Thorne from his San Francisco days, and a simple drug bust would not have prompted such a frantic phone call.

  "Dr. MacLaren," he said. "I'm Special Agent Cheshire. What can we do for you today?"

  "You can let me in," Colin said, beginning to become irritated. He plucked Becket's card from Cheshire's fingers. "A friend of mine called and asked me to come here. She said there was some trouble, and it looks as if there is. What's going on?"

  "And who would that be?" Cheshire asked, ignoring Colin's questions.

  Colin debated telling him. The man had no right to question him—or, at least, Colin had a right not to answer—but stonewalling Special Agent Cheshire wouldn't get Colin into Shadow's Gate.

  "A friend of mine, Caroline Jourdemayne. She called me about two hours ago, but we were cut off by the storm. Is she all right, Mr. Cheshire? She seemed to be pretty upset."

  The agent smiled thinly. "An officer will drive you up to the house, Dr. MacLaren."

  Colin didn't bother to argue. He got out of his car and climbed into the back of a Dutchess County Sheriff's car. The car pulled away smoothly, passing through the mock-Neuschwanstein ornament of the gatehouse, and heading up the long drive. Shadow's Gate was set at the back of a hundred-acre parcel, and it was almost a mile to the house.

  "It's good to see you here, Mr. MacLaren," the sheriffs deputy said. "You won't remember me, but my name is Lockridge. Frank Lockridge. I was at an interdepartmental inservice about Satanism and cult crimes that you spoke at down in the city about eight months ago? It's been a real help—especially since he moved in up here. I don't know who whistled you up this time, Professor, but I'm damn glad to have you here."

  "Could you tell me what's going on here? If the FBI doesn't mind, of course," Colin said.

  Colin could see Frank Lockridge grimace in the rearview mirror. "Once the Fibbies get into a case, that's usually the end of it. They think this son-of-a-bitch Blackburn was mixed up with the Weathermen, and that's all they care about."

  "'Was'?" Colin seized upon the word.

  "Definitely past tense, for my money. They've been waiting for dawn to search the woods, but they aren't going to find him. He's run far and fast, and I can't say I blame him. That, or he's dead."

  Thome dead. No wonder Caroline had sounded so upset on the phone, if that were true. Colin knew that Caroline Jourdemayne had loved Thorne nearly as much as her twin did, but had been unwilling to follow him as blindly. His death would devastate her.

  Colin pieced the story together from his own knowledge as well as from what Frank Lockridge told him on the long drive up to the house.

  The Dutchess County Sheriff's department had been first on the scene, a little after two o'clock this morning. There'd been a call for an ambulance, which had taken away one Katherine Jourdemayne, pronounced dead on the scene by the medical examiner, autopsy pending. According to Deputy Lockridge, the whole house had reeked of incense, pot, and worse, and there was evidence that a Satanic ritual had been in progress at the time the girl died.

  The authorities very much wished to question Katherine's lover, Thorne Blackburn, but no one could find him. Meanwhile, everyone in the house was being held as material witnesses to the crime, if crime it truly was.

  Colin wanted to ask Lockridge a question, but just then the car came over the rise, and he caught his first glimpse of Shadow's Gate.

  The sprawling Victorian, made of red brick and the pale local stone, had much the same look of a fairy-tale castle as the gatehouse had. Three cone-roofed towers set with long narrow windows rose up from the corners of the rambling structure, and clustered around the front door were more emergency vehicles. The surrounding grounds were covered with storm detritus, and Colin could see the white scars of downed trees all across the grounds and into the forest beyond. The echoes of some force greater than the storm still echoed over these hills.

  "And none of those kids'll give us the time of day. They keep yammering on about First Amendment rights—dammit, this is a murder investigation!"

  Katherine dead, Thorne missing. And the police willing to believe it's murder because of Thome's reputation, and the FBI involved because of. . . the Weather Underground? That's ridiculous!

  "How did Miss Jourdemayne die?" Colin asked, voice even. Thorne had never used any safeguards in his rituals, and now the retribution had come.

  "Drugs, probably. That's what the ME said." Lockridge shrugged. "Stark naked, and not a mark on her that I saw. Hippies."

  The contempt in his voice was indictment enough.

  The survivors of Thome's band—already that seemed the right word to use— had been gathered in the dining room. Other than the wan light of dawn streaming in through the windows, the only illumination in the room was provided by candles: the power was out at Shadow's Gate.

  He saw Jonathan Ashwell, still in his ritual robes, stroking the back of a weeping woman. Since the last time Colin had seen him, Jonathan had grown a beard; it was dark and bushy, and with his long hair, it gave him a passing resemblance to the mad monk Rasputin. About half of those gathered in the room were still wearing their ritual robes, and of the rest, some were in pajamas, some in street clothes. Caroline, wearing a sensible pantsuit and aviator-frame glasses, looked as if she had come from another world. Several of the women were holding crying babies, and young children clung to the adults' legs and whimpered. Most of the women, and some of the men, were crying, sobbing unashamedly as children. How could anyone think that Thorne Blackburn was a fugitive, when here in this room was all the evidence of his death that anyone should ever need?

  With the grieving survivors surrounding him, the anguish of the tragedy was overpowering. Sternly, Colin forced himself to concentrate, to shut out the emotions that filled this room, the sea of agony through which the officers walked as if it didn't exist.

  "Colin!" Caroline said, coming over to him. There were dark circles under her eyes, and she'd been crying for so long her eyes were swollen and dry. She threw her arms around him—a young woman who had suffered the most intimate of all bereavements, the loss of a twin, desperate for comfort.

  For a moment he simply held her as her body shook with unsheddable tears. Then she pushed herself away.

  "Caroline?" Colin asked. He needed to know what had happened here. She shook her head, as if no matter what he said, she had no answer.

  "Caroline, where's Thorne?"

  Her eyes focused on him then, fathomless wells of pain. "I don't know. They were all in the temple. I helped both of them get ready for the ritual. And . . . Katherine's dead," she finished, as if it were a new discovery.

  "I know," Colin said gently.

  Colin could feel the seething currents of violence that eddied beneath every action in this room. Thorne had not been well liked in Shadowkill, and he'd never done well with authority at the best of times. With a pang of memory, Colin thought back to that day in Golden Gate Park. Two years ago. A lifetime for Thorne Blackburn.

  The deputy standing in the doorway glared at Colin. "And who the hell let you in here?"

  "MacLaren's our big city voodoo expert," Deputy Lockridge said mildly, defusing the scene as much as he could. "Let me see if I can find Detective Hodge and see what he wants done, Mr. MacLaren." He walked away quickly.

  Colin spared a useless wish that Claire were here. Somehow she always had the ability to calm tense situations just by her presence. He could use a little of that calm now.

  "It's no use," Caroline said quietly, in a voice made rough by weeping. "They hate him too much. He made fools of them and now they're going to destroy everything he ever worked for. It's finished. The New Aeon is dead."

  A redhead in a red robe, her heavy makeup running down her face in black tear-streaks, came over and put her arms around Caroline.


  "Now hush, lovey. Kate's gone on to a better place, you know that. And Thorne . . . don't you grieve for him. He's free. No one can hurt him now." Colin recognized Irene Avalon from Thorne's San Francisco days. She looked at Colin beseechingly. "Make them let us go, Colin," she begged. "We haven't done anything. And there are children here." She pointed at the corner where a black-haired toddler slept on a folded blanket, clutching a battered teddy bear to her cheek.

  "Get your hands off me!"

  Colin turned toward the familiar voice in time to see a uniformed officer shove Jonathan Ashwell back into a chair. Colin could just imagine what he looked like to the officer, between the long hair and the ritual robes. Just another wild-eyed loonie, right, boys? Colin thought derisively.

  "Just cool your heels, sonny-boy," a uniformed officer said.

  "You Nazi Neanderthal," Jonathan snarled. "You've got no right to hold us here. You're tearing the house apart—where's your warrant? 'Miranda was ratified three years ago!"

  "I'll see what I can do," Colin said to Irene. He walked over to Jonathan.

  "Suspicion of a crime in progress, longhair," the officer snarled at Jonathan. "And I'll 'Miranda your ass, you little—"

  "Back off, pig, or I'll have you up on charges faster than you can say 'ACLU,' " Jonathan snarled. The mingled anger and grief with which he regarded the policeman did nothing to make him look any saner.

  "Jonathan," Colin said quietly. "Can you tell me what's going on?"

  "Hey," the uniformed officer said. "The lieutenant doesn't want these guys talking to each other."

  "Arrest me, pork rind," Jonathan sneered.

  The officer started for him; Colin hastily interposed his body between them.

  "Jonathan, shut up. Officer, I'm Colin MacLaren; I'm a consultant to the New York City Police Department. This young man is one of my former students. I'd appreciate the opportunity to talk to him."

  Colin had told no lies, but he had subtly managed to convey the notion that he had been called in by the police. He saw the uniformed officer relax and step back.