Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  "Sure. Take him on into the kitchen. There's coffee there."

  Colin took Jonathan's arm and led him through into the house's old Victorian kitchen. It had obviously become a base of operations for the police; there were several cardboard boxes on the kitchen table, filled with Styrofoam coffee cups bearing the logo of a deli down in Shadowkill. Colin sorted through until he found two that were full, and handed one to Jonathan.

  "Now. Quickly, as we may not have much time. Tell me what happened here, Jonathan. I have to know before I can help."

  "Thorne's gone."

  The last time Colin had seen such a look of blank bewilderment in someone's eyes it had been in the eyes of the refugees in the DP camps after the War. He pushed the memory aside.

  "Gone where, Jonathan?"

  "Gone." Jonathan shrugged helplessly, much as Caroline had done. "Kate's dead," he added, as if this were news.

  "Tell me what happened," Colin said.

  He was unprepared for Jonathan's answer.

  "No."

  Colin stared at him in disbelief.

  "I can't. You aren't Sealed to the Circle. I can't tell you what happened. You're not one of us."

  "For God's sake, Jonathan," Colin burst out, before he could stop himself, "this is serious!" And I would have given the same answer, if our positions had been reversed.

  "So is the Work," Jonathan said wearily. With a gallant effort, he pulled himself together. "Do you think I don't know what's going to happen when we tell the police that? If they're going to hold us as material witnesses, we don't have any Miranda rights—not to an attorney, and not to a trial. It isn't going to be pretty, but we haven't got any choice. But I'll tell you what I can. Maybe Caroline can tell you more—she isn't one of us. Not Sealed to the Circle, at least, but I know she believes in what Thorne's doing. Anyway, we were doing a working tonight, during a big storm. Something . . . went wrong."

  Colin waited, but Jonathan was obviously finished talking.

  "That's all you have to say?" Colin said, striving to keep the incredulous-ness out of his voice. "'Something went wrong?"

  "Kate's dead," Jonathan repeated, as if the thought kept suddenly occurring to him. "And Thorne's . . ." There was an almost unbearable hesitation. "Thorne's gone."

  "Gone where?" Run away? Colin couldn't believe it. He could believe that Thorne might have killed Katherine Jourdemayne with malice aforethought sooner than that he had fled the scene of even the worst mishap in fear. Thorne was utterly fearless, and fiercely loyal. He would never abandon his followers. Never.

  "Gone." Incredibly, there was a note of amusement in Jonathan's voice. "Just . . . gone, Colin, and no one will ever find him." His voice broke, and he struggled for self-control. "And Kate's dead. Oh, God, we were trying a new mix; Thorne said it would keep her 'there.' But she must have taken too much. He was always on her about that. . . ."

  He put his hand over his face, and his next words were muffled. "And now the cops're looking for a scapegoat. And it's going to be us. And it doesn't matter. Because he's gone."

  "Gone." That was the word all of them had used, Irene and Caroline, and ' Jonathan. Gone. Not dead, not fleeing. Just . . . gone.

  "Where did he go?" Colin demanded. "Jonathan, if you know, you have to tell me. Thorne needs a lawyer—protection—"

  Protection from the police. Colin could not now even remember the moment in which that last innocence had died and he'd come to understand that even the guiltless were punished in this brave new America.

  This time Jonathan laughed. "Oh, Colin, you don't get it, do you? Thorne never left the Temple." He slumped into one of the kitchen chairs and leaned on , the table, resting his head on his folded arms. "They will never find him."

  The sentence had the finality of an epitaph. And despite Colin's pleas, Jonathan would say nothing else.

  It was another hour before Colin managed to see Lieutenant Hodge. He'd gained permission for a couple of the women to go upstairs—under police escort—and bring down things for the infants and children, and Caroline and Irene had moved into the kitchen, producing fresh coffee and a scratch breakfast for everyone. Caroline Jourdemayne was thoroughly respectable—a spinster librarian—and she used that respectability like a weapon, forcing the officers to acknowledge her.

  But the situation was still tense. No one had been arrested yet, but that could happen at any moment. And Pilgrim and two other children were missing, no one knew where.

  "Dr. MacLaren. I'm Lieutenant Hodge."

  Lieutenant Hodge was a few years younger than Colin, but already comfortably entrenched in middle age. He was fair and balding, as so many natives of this area of the country were, and he wore a rumpled trenchcoat over a grey suit.

  "Lieutenant," Colin said.

  "Deputy Lockridge thinks you're pretty groovy," Hodge said. "But what I want to know is, what are you doing here?"

  He was, Colin reflected, getting pretty tired of answering that question.

  "I'm a friend of Caroline Jourdemayne," he said again. "She called me and asked me to come. I came. I don't want to intrude on your show, Lieutenant," he added, "but I may be able to help. I have a certain amount of experience in this area, as Lieutenant Becket and a number of other people can tell you."

  "Do tell," Lieutenant Hodge rasped, sounding irritable and tired. "And suppose you tell me what your 'experience' tells you."

  It was a setup question, since all Colin had seen was the dining room. He hadn't gone into the Temple or even seriously questioned any of the members of Thorne's Circle other than Jonathan.

  "Well, first of all," Colin said, "these people aren't Satanists. As far as I know, they aren't worshiping any deity at all, least of all the Christian Devil. Blackburn's Temple—where, I gather, Katherine Jourdemayne died, probably of an accidental drug overdose—is a place where Blackburn and his followers practiced ritual magic, which is, at its simplest, a collection of consciousness-altering techniques derived from experimental psychology. This being the case, I wouldn't expect to see any animal sacrifices or blood offerings—as are typical oivoudoun, for example. And I'd be very surprised to see any Christian iconography at all, let alone any desecration of the Cross or the Host."

  If Hodge didn't stare at him in slack-jawed amazement, he did at least regard Colin with something closer to respect.

  "Well, aren't you the little expert? Why don't you and me take a little walk?" Hodge flicked on his flashlight and indicated the door. "Frank, me and the Professor are going for a walk—keep Cheshire off my back, would you?"

  Lieutenant Hodge led Colin through the shadowy halls of Shadow's Gate, stopping outside a room that was garishly lit with battery lamps. The double doors had been ripped from the hinges, and even the metal of the hinges was pulled and distorted.

  "That wasn't us," Hodge said, noting the direction of Colin's gaze. "The doors were like this when we arrived. They're in here." Hodge stepped through the doorway.

  Following him, Colin could see the doors lying just inside the doorway, as though whatever force had ripped them free had let them fall almost immediately.

  The room was round, thirty feet in diameter and almost twice that in height. Heaven only knew what this room had originally been. The ceiling had been painted—long before Thorne had owned the place—with the signs of the Zodiac, gold against blue. Below its dome there was a band of stained-glass windows, some of them open. Watermarks stained the walls below. Around the edge of the black-and-white marble floor, gigantic papier-mache figures of the Egyptian gods alternated with banners in red, black, white, and grey—at least they had, before some force had flung the statues about the room as if they were ninepins and ripped the banners from the walls.

  Colin stared around himself, searching for familiar landmarks of the Inner Tradition in vain. There was no Table of Hermes. The edge of the circle had been marked by candles, but whatever force had ripped the doors off their hinges had dashed the candles against the walls as well. Colin could see
six from where he stood, and thought there must be more.

  This was like no Temple, Light or Dark, that he had ever seen. The four banners were not hung at the cardinal points, nor were they of the cardinal colors, nor were the Four Tools or the Four Elements represented anywhere. These banners had the figures of animals: the red banner had the figure of a white horse, the black banner had a red stag, and so on.

  Nor was the double-cube altar present, though there was a low couch in the center of the floor, directly beneath the apex of the dome. The couch was covered with animal furs and pine boughs, now in disarray. Their green scent warred with the heavy bitter scent of frankincense and another odor Colin couldn't quite place.

  What had these children been doing? What sort of magick had Thorne been working here—and what had he summoned? Colin felt no sense of presence here in Thorne's Temple, but without Claire he couldn't be sure. If only he had some idea of what they'd been doing. . . .

  A cold sense of failure settled heavily over him. He should have made it his business to know. Who was he sent to protect, if not innocents such as these? He'd been distracted by the more obvious threat of the Thule cult reborn. Only now, when it was too late, did he realize that there had been a more subtle, less glamorous battle to fight—one well within his power. But his pride had blinded him, dismissing what Thorne did as childish mummery, without content.

  And so it had come to this.

  "Dear Lord." Colin sighed. "Forgive me, all of you. . . ." Arrogance was the shadow-self of competence; though the easy mastery he had once possessed had faded with the fires of youth, the hubris had remained.

  Never again.

  Never again would he turn away from a battle because it was too small, too insignificant, the adversary too harmless. Never again would he set conditions to his participation in the fight. He had thought that Thorne's maverick magick did not matter, and he had been wrong.

  Everything mattered. Each moment of inattention brought the Shadow closer. Each tiny compromise, irrelevant in itself, diminished the Light.

  Colin set those painful thoughts aside for later contemplation. He was here now. He must do what he could for the living.

  There were two swords lying on the floor, as though they had been carelessly tossed aside. He walked over to them, looking down.

  "Don't touch those," Hodge said sharply. "We still have to dust for fingerprints."

  "Good luck," Colin said absently. The only fingerprints Hodge was likely to find were those of the children here in the house, and that would hardly be of help to him. Neither of these blades had been used to kill.

  Both swords were custom-forged ritual blades, their steel etched with runes. The black-hilted sword had silver furnishings and a spherical moonstone pommel; the white hilt had a gold haft and quillons, with a carnelian cube for the pommel weight. Colin straightened up, looking around.

  "Did you find a book?" he asked.

  "A book?" Hodge said suspiciously. "What kind of a book?"

  "This would be ..." Colin closed his eyes and thought, trying to put his description in words they'd understand. "A handwritten book, possibly fairly large, but elaborately bound in any case." The design of Thorne’s Temple told him that much about the magician's style: flamboyant, as Thorne himself had been. "It would contain a number of diagrams. It might not be in English."

  Every magician Colin had ever known kept a magickal workbook, and if he could find Thorne's, it might give him a clue to what had happened here.

  "Sid! You seen a book here?" Hodge barked.

  One of the crime-scene technicians straightened up; he had been photographing one of the fallen statues. "This whole place is full of books, Leo," he said disgustedly. "They got a whole library full."

  "Something handwritten—like a trick book," Hodge said. Sid shrugged.

  "We'll look for it, Doc," he said to Colin. "So. These guys weren't Satanists?"

  "No," Colin said absently, looking around the room. I'm not sure what they were, but it wasn't that. "I can tell you that much right now. Their rituals would have been something more like ... are you a Mason, by any chance, Lieutenant?"

  Hodge stared at him suspiciously, obviously not intending to answer the question.

  "At any rate, these rituals certainly wouldn't have involved any unwilling participants, so if you're hoping to close the books on any missing children, Lieutenant, I'm afraid you're going to have to look elsewhere."

  "The only missing child I'm interested in is Blackburn," Hodge growled. "And those three kids. All this . . . stuff wouldn't happen to tell you where any of them are, would it, Doc?"

  Colin sighed inwardly, giving up on the hope of getting the Lieutenant to call him "Mr." or even "Colin." He thought about what Jonathan and the others had said about Thorne.

  He's gone.

  He never left the Temple.

  "I'm sorry," Colin said. "I haven't the faintest idea. For what it's worth, I hope you find them all, Lieutenant."

  "Oh, we'll find them, all right," Hodge said.

  Two of the children were located an hour later, when a deputy heard them crying—they'd shut themselves into a cupboard upstairs when the commotion had started, and then couldn't get out. Nine-year-old Pilgrim, Thorne's son by an unknown mother, was found in the woods behind the house after a five-day absence. The area had been searched several times before, without success, so it was believed that Pilgrim had received adult assistance in his disappearance—Pilgrim refused to tell them where he'd been. The boy was turned over to the child protective services to join the rest of the children from Shadow's Gate.

  And though there were roadblocks on every main road in Dutchess County for a week, and the entire area was combed with dogs and helicopters, Thorne Blackburn was never found.

  Colin did what he could to help the surviving members of Thome's Circle, goaded by a combination of nebulous guilt and outrage at the way they were treated. The murder/disappearance at Shadow's Gate quickly became a media circus, and like the ancient Roman circuses which it so closely resembled, sacrificial victims were required.

  Irene Avalon, Jonathan Ashwell, Deborah Winwood, and the rest of the active members of the Circle of Truth—who were already being held as material witnesses—were formally arrested on May 3 on a smorgasbord of charges, including drug dealing and conspiracy to commit a felony.

  It was a witch hunt, pure and simple: the Establishment against the hippies. Without Thorne to protect them, his followers were easy prey. Those who had not been arrested were turned out of the mansion and the site "sealed," but that didn't keep the estate from being overrun by looters and curiosity seekers who stripped it nearly bare before the authorities would consent to the expensive necessity of posting a twenty-four-hour guard over the estate.

  "There's so little I can do, Caroline," Colin said sadly.

  It was late July, and the fan turning lazily overhead brought the scent of simmering asphalt from the street outside. They were sitting in a booth in a diner outside the county courthouse in Poughkeepsie. Caroline had come to file another in what seemed to be an unending series of petitions; Katherine Jourdemayne was dead, but Katherine's daughter lived, and Caroline was desperately trying to gain custody of her.

  Hovering over them both was the grim memory of Deborah Winwood's suicide six weeks before. Despite her lawyer's best efforts, Deborah had been declared an unfit mother, and her baby girl had been taken away from her. The prosecution took her death soon after as a vindication of its judgment, but Colin's heart ached for the despair that had prompted Deborah to take her own life. It seemed a final mockery that the charges against the Shadowkill Twelve had been dropped just a week later.

  "At least Johnnie's dad sprang for a good lawyer," Caroline said with a sigh.

  General Jonathan Griswold Ashwell II held the same opinion of his son as he did of his country: mine, right or wrong. He'd had the money and clout to get the charges against his son dropped, and the grudging but rock-ribbed sense of fair pla
y to insist that Jonathan's codefendants be treated in the same way that Jonathan had been. Conspiracy charges had been dropped, and bail had finally been set. It was likely that the drug charges would be quietly dropped before the cases came to trial.

  "How are you doing?" Colin asked.

  Caroline sipped her coffee. "As well as can be expected. That poor baby! She cries and clings to me every time they let me see her—" Her voice roughened and she stopped. When she spoke again, her voice was deliberately cheerful, with a bravery that came near to breaking Colin's heart.

  "But thank God for birth certificates. They can't deny that Kate was my sister or that Truth is her daughter. I'm Truth's closest living relative; they have to grant me custody, don't they, no matter what that damned psychiatrist says? I swear to you, if he whines one more time about the advantages of Truth having a home with a father and a mother—if I would just give her up for adoption. As if single women weren't out there raising children every day—" She stopped herself again and took another sip of coffee.

  "Sorry. Sorry. But you see, don't you, how very careful I have to be? Respectability is all I have going for me. I've sworn myself blue-faced assuring them that I never had anything to do with the commune, or ... him. And I've got to keep it that way. One reefer, and that's all it would take. I'd never see Truth again. And she's all I have left, of either of them."

  "I understand," Colin said quietly. "And as I've told you, if there is anything that Claire or I can do, for either of you . . ."

  "You've already done so much, both of you. I'm sure I'd have gone mad without a shoulder to cry on these past few weeks. That just makes what I need to say so much harder."

  Colin waited.

  "Stay away." Caroline stared at her plate, her sandwich nearly untouched. "And tell the others, the rest of the Circle, if you talk to them. Stay away. I can't afford . . . any appearance of impropriety, if you follow. Not if I'm to get Truth."

  Colin smiled to himself grimly. Guilt by association, the terror-tactic of the fascist state. Here in sixties America, alive and well. He was not offended. Caroline was right—even the most respectable parapsychologist was too outre for the connection to do her any good.