Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  He reached across the table and patted her hand. "It's all right, Caroline. I understand, and Claire will, too. Thorne has already been tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty. The only thing you can do is open up as much distance between yourself, and him, and various fellow travelers as you can."

  "It's so unfair," Caroline whispered huskily. "They just want to crucify him for telling them they could be free. And he was right. Wasn't he?"

  Colin had no answer for her.

  INTERLUDE #5

  JULY 1969

  LOOKING BACK UPON IT FROM ACROSS THE BRIDGE OF YEARS, I THINK THAT 1969 was the year that the battle lines were really drawn. Thorne's disappearance in May was, in a weird way, almost a sort of prelude to the Tate-LaBianca murders that August. After that, the Age of Aquarius was firmly intertwined in the public mind with insanity, torture, and murder. . . .

  In October, one of Thorne's dreams was realized when a quarter of a million people marched against death in Washington D.C., forming a circle around the Pentagon, chanting and holding hands, attempting to destroy the war machine through pure love. If Thorne had been alive to lead them, I wonder—would it have worked?

  In a strange way, his death hardened Colin—I think he always felt personally responsible for what happened at Shadow's Gate, even though the Almighty Himself could not have changed Thorne's mind once he'd decided to do something. But after that terrible night, Colin focused more and more on insulating innocents from the kiss of the Unseen, as if somehow that could redeem those who had died at Shadow's Gate.

  All around us through those dark months, events seemed to conspire to hold up a mirror to our dreams and nightmares, showing us how much we had changed in ten short years. Within twenty-four hours of Neil Armstrong's walk upon the moon—something that should have been a glorious landmark in human history—the horror of Chappaquiddick had pushed Apollo 11 off the front pages. Somehow, unfairly, it seemed worse that a Kennedy had done this thing, as though somehow the family that we'd pinned our national hopes to had betrayed us—as if they had held the soul of America in their keeping and had failed some trust.

  I think it was that sense of betrayal that sent my generation to Woodstock in such passionate numbers, as if now that all hope of regaining Camelot was truly gone, we needed a new dream to sustain us. Woodstock became a myth even while it was happening, and the myth grew in splendor until, the following year, Abbie Hoffman could claim citizenship in the Woodstock Nation.

  In some way, Thorne was one of the lucky ones—he did not live to see it. I know that he would have seen then what I only thought of years later—that the apotheosis of a generation was also its end, the moment when the best and the brightest among us abandoned us and themselves, setting the stage for what was to follow.

  They'd given their hearts to a dream, you see, and the dream had died. The Woodstock Nation was a dream, and no one could live there. Or if they could, it was, like Neverland, a country of the young, and Time is the one thing that no one can argue with. Time passed for my generation as it had for our parents, driving us out of the Nation. When we discovered that our own hearts had betrayed us, we were abandoned in a world that had no more dreams.

  Without a dream to light your way, the world is a very dark place.

  TEN

  NEW YORK, AUTUMN 1972

  0! never say that I was false of heart, Though absence seem'd my flame to qualify. — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  NEW YORK SEEMED TO GROW DARKER AND DIRTIER EVERY YEAR, COLIN MacLaren thought to himself in resignation. He knew better than to ascribe that dour observation to anything other than the passing of years; he was two years past the half-century mark, the point at which any man must stop and consider his life.

  For most of his early life his inner sight had been dazzled by the enormity of the battle in which the Light was engaged, but the passing of years had reminded him that the generalship of that great struggle was not his, nor had it ever truly been. Slowly he had learned to concentrate on those battles within the reach of his hand. It was not his to build the cathedral, nor to tear it down; only to repair what other hands had made, so that the hands to come after could take up such work in their turn.

  And when he was not called to that Labor, Colin did his other work-small, undramatic, and purely mundane striving to enlighten the great mass of people.

  Selkie Press was a small, independent publisher of occult books—teetering, like all such presses, on the verge of bankruptcy. It was dedicated to collecting and reprinting important material in the field of magick and the supernatural. Under Colin's editorship, a number of classics of parapsychological research had been brought back into print, as well as more esoteric items of interest to a small yet dedicated readership.

  Last year Selkie Press had reprinted Margrave and Anstey's The Natural History of the Poltergeist, Taverner's Ha'ants, Spooks, and Fetchmen, and a number of extracts from a medieval Spanish grimoire called La Tesoraria del On.

  In Colin's opinion the grimoire was a thoroughly dangerous book, and he saw no reason to make its potential available to the world at large. He'd edited the press's version of La Tesoraria rigorously and without a single qualm. There was a middle ground between censorship and utter irresponsibility, and there was certain information which Colin would not freely dispense any more than he would give a baby a loaded gun. Responsible stewardship was the first commandment of his Lodge, and Colin kept the faith.

  As Thorne Blackburn had not.

  Reflexively, Colin put the old pain from him. Thorne was dead and the world had moved on, much as if what had happened at Shadow's Gate had ended the morning of the Aquarian Age in one fell stroke of night. These days, it seemed impossible that anyone had ever seriously thought that they could reshape the material world with magick.

  The hard brilliant light that was such a feature of a New York autumn gilded the brick walls of the buildings across the back courtyard and turned the tiny scrap of sky he could see a deep Egyptian blue. This time of year always made Colin feel restless, as though he were late in setting out upon a journey.

  Perhaps he was.

  Sighing, Colin set the book he was reading—a biography of a pioneer in the field of parapsychology that Selkie was thinking of reprinting—down on the desk in his tiny back bedroom office. He missed the view from the top floor, but the first floor had been the only apartment vacant when he'd decided to move back East, and Colin had hated the thought of evicting a tenant for nothing more than a whim. And the first-floor apartment had its compensations—there was a fireplace in the living room.

  He gave the book a farewell pat and dismissed it from his mind. He had a couple of weeks before his report on it was due to Alan, and another engagement for this evening.

  The Sorcery Shoppe was located in the east Thirties, just off Sixth Avenue (like all true New Yorkers, Colin had never been able to adjust to its rechris-tening as the Avenue of the Americas, even after thirty years). The brisk walk uptown from his apartment reminded him of how much he still loved the city, despite its many flaws. The great occultist Dion Fortune had once written that in the major population centers, one could see Civilization as it would be twenty years in the future.

  If that were so, then the future was a place in which only the strong would survive. New York's population had nearly doubled since the fifties; the grace notes to daily living that cities such as San Francisco still retained were being hammered out of Baghdad on the Hudson beneath the heavy hand of progress. Colin tried to imagine the streets around him in another twenty years' time and could not manage it. Our vision always fails in the homely things, not the great. His first teacher had told him that.

  The Shoppe stood out among its neighbors, a bright peacock among a flock of dingy commercial establishments. It was that rarest of beasts, a store catering to the occult and New Age that predated the Age of Aquarius. While its stock consisted primarily of books—many of them Selkie Press titles—it also sold herbs, candles, and other
oddments.

  The building in which the Sorcery Shoppe was housed was over a century old and had begun its life, long ago, as a pharmacy and soda fountain. All that remained from that long-ago incarnation was the pressed tin ceiling (now painted black), the parquet marble floor, and the long mirror that filled all one side of the shop. Now greenish and corroded with age, the mirror served as a backdrop to jar-filled shelves of dried herbs, causing the unwary to startle when they caught a glimpse of themselves in the ravaged mirror beyond the jars. The storefront was painted bright red and dotted with black-and-yellow cabalistic symbols, and a black banner with silver letters hanging from a flagpole over the door proclaimed the shop's name.

  As Colin approached, he could see that the display window was, as always, draped in black velvet, and bestrewn with the most lurid of the Sorcery Shoppe's merchandise: illuminated crystal balls, star-tipped Wizard Wands, dried bats, human skulls, and other lurid Hollywood paraphernalia.

  As its name suggested, the Sorcery Shoppe happily catered to the more sensational aspects of magick, serving as the crossroads for most of Manhattan's esoteric community no matter their Path or inclination, but alongside its amulets and voodoo-doll kits, it carried serious scholarly books impossible to find elsewhere, and hosted lectures given by authorities in their various fields. Colin himself had lectured here on a number of occasions.

  Today, however, he had not come to lecture, but rather to hear a lecture given by John Cannon, a notorious popularizer of the occult in the Hans Holtzer vein. Unfortunately, there was a certain amount of meat to Cannons books—sound research and extensive quotations from public domain sources—but Cannon's books, for all the facts they contained, were not meant to teach. They were meant to entertain and titillate, producing in their readers the same sort of pleasurable fear that a child experienced in walking past a "haunted" house.

  Tonight, the subject was Black Witchcraft. John Cannon claimed to have firsthand knowledge of an operating black coven.

  Colin knew that most self-styled witches—or, as they preferred to be known these days, Wiccans—practiced a harmless form of Nature-worship established by the Englishman Gerald B. Gardner. Even though their practices had more ties to the Hashbury than to Hell, their attempts to "reclaim" their traditional designations of "witch" and "coven" only led to them becoming confused by the public with LaVey-style Satanism (which also used these terms for its practices).

  Fortunately, most of the modern "White" Witches that Colin had met were quiet, reserved, and decidedly publicity-shy, so that public conflicts rarely arose. Still, it was important to draw the distinction between White and Black Witchcraft in the public mind, lest innocent people be harmed.

  As Colin entered the shop, the usual reek assaulted his nose, the mingled scents of frankincense and dust and pot that made up the place's distinctive fragrance. He stopped at the register and bought a ticket to the lecture. There was a large bulletin board beside the cash register; Colin stopped to glance over the postings. Most of them, as usual, were the typical farrago of ads by astrologers and self-proclaimed descendants of recently founded ancient priesthoods, but one or two items were of interest.

  In addition to the large color poster advertising tonight's speaker—a glossy full-color n x 17 poster with a studio portrait of the speaker, who looked more like an insurance agent than an intrepid explorer of the dark underbelly of magick—there were two that caught his interest. One was silkscreened in shades of green and purple, with stars and unicorns and a Moon-crowned Goddess of suspiciously Art Nouveau aspect. Its design owed more than a little to the acid art he was familiar with from the Bay Area, and seemed to be proclaiming the formation of the Earthrite Temple of Pagan Witchcraft, sponsored by Coven Tree.

  Colin smiled at the gentle play on words. He knew some of the members of Coven Tree; they were harmless dilettantes, interested in feminism and spiritual self-expression, though some of those attracted to them might not be. He made a note to keep a weather eye on them and turned to the other.

  In comparison to the first, it was crude; a black-and-white Xerox of a press-typed original. It announced that applications were being taken for a study group on the Blackburn Work. Serious inquiries only, and a familiarity with the Work was essential, the notice said. The contact address was a post office box in Queens.

  Colin gazed at it, frowning, his mind thousands of miles away as he tucked his ticket into his vest pocket.

  There'd been a flurry of interest in Thorne Blackburn just after the Shadow's Gate mess; Time had done a cover story on his disappearance and Katherine Jourdemayne's death. Though no trace of his body had been found in three years of searching, Colin had no doubt that Thorne was dead. Apparently death had catapulted him into some strange American immortality usually reserved for dead rock stars, at least judging by this advertisement.

  Colin shrugged, turning away and heading for the lecture room in the back of the store. The Sorcery Shoppe's lectures were notorious for their late starts, and in fact, when he arrived in the lecture room, Colin was the first one there.

  He glanced around. The Shoppe's back room was also used by a Magickal Lodge active in the New York area; the equipment from their last ritual were stacked carefully in the corner, looking like nothing more fantastic than worn and dusty theatrical props.

  Was this all that magick was? It was easy to think so; to doubt, to give in and accept what everyone said—that magick was no more than self-hypnosis in fancy dress.

  But Colin's entire life had been dedicated to the belief that the sum of humanity was so much more than a simple empirical assessment of quantity and duration. To deny the realm of the spirit was to deny half of all Creation: even if magick were reduced to nothing more than passionate belief, such passion was a force that could build cathedrals out of nothing and carve empires out of wilderness. Yet Cannon's books were the only glimpse some people ever got of a world outside their own, and the viewpoint he presented made it easy to dismiss magick as a Faustian exercise in self-delusive smoke and mirrors: self-important, foolish . . . and harmless, in the long run.

  The nineteenth century had been like one long chess game between Spirit and Substance, played out in the echoing aftermath of the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon's imperial ambitions, and the scars of the Rationalists' misguided reforms still shaped the modern world. If the Age of Reason that had swept through the West at the end of the eighteenth century had committed any great crime, it was this: that in shutting out superstition and fanaticism, the Rationalists had attempted to reduce the whole of God's creation to something that could be measured in a balance.

  On one side, Darwin and Freud, proclaiming mankind nothing more than a computer made out of meat, assembled by random chance and a blind watchmaker.

  And on the other side, Mathers, Case, Waite, Fortune, Crowley . . . the magnificent irrationality of Helena Blavatsky, fighting against the Rationalist's cold equations, working desperately in a world that thought them ludicrous eccentrics or even criminal lunatics to keep the glorious medieval panoply of High Sorcery from being swept away, so that the tools of that alchemy by which animals become angels would not be lost.

  It was a battle without malice, without enemies, as oblivious as that of the seed to take root and flower; a battle that continued to this very day.

  That would be fought here, again, tonight.

  The room had started to fill as Colin stood lost in his own thoughts. As he'd suspected, the audience was substantially the same as that for his own lectures: young and upwardly mobile gypsies of the spirit, with a small scattering of veteran dilettantes and seasoned seekers.

  There was a good turnout; John Cannon was apparently a popular speaker. Colin took his place on an uncomfortable metal chair in the front row and turned his attention to the podium. It was decorated with a poster similar to the one out in front, proclaiming John Cannon as the author of The Devil in America, The True Story of Witchcraft, and Voodoo in the Modern World, as well as
of several other equally sensational titles.

  When the room was fairly full, a man wearing dark slacks, sportcoat, and a black turtleneck—gaunt, and much taller than Colin had suspected from the photograph—entered the room. John Cannon had the stooped carriage of a file clerk. Except for his imposing height, he would blend easily into any crowd; a good attribute for an investigative reporter to have. He was carrying a sheaf of papers as he ascended to the podium, and spent a few minutes arranging them as he stood there, waiting for the audience to settle.

  "Good evening, folks. I'm John Cannon—my friends call me Jock. In the past few years I've poked my nose into quite a few dark corners of the world, and seen a few things that would make your hair stand on end." He ran a hand through his sandy brown hair and smiled self-deprecatingly. Cannon had a confident resonant voice—he was obviously a practiced public speaker.

  "I've chased ghosts in England, devils in Haiti, and demons in New Orleans. I thought I'd seen just about everything, but I was wrong. Tonight I'm here to talk to you about Black Magick—not as something safely tucked away in a history book, but right here, right now. In New York City, today, right this minute, there are people forming covens and worshiping the Devil. It's no joke. These people are deadly serious—and I do mean deadly."

  For the next hour John Cannon spun his audience tales of his experiences in his practiced raconteur fashion, telling of how he'd penetrated a dark occult underworld that existed right beneath their very noses—a world of orgiastic sex, dangerous drugs, and deliberate blasphemy.

  "These people have absolutely no scruples whatsoever. They will use any method to achieve their sensual self-gratification, whether it be old-fashioned strong-arm techniques, or ... Black Magick."