I think if Peter's mother had lived, I might have sought reconciliation with them, for my estrangement had always troubled Elizabeth and I would have done nearly anything to please her. As it was, I stayed away, refusing to return to any part of the life I'd had before Peter's death, and the suspended relationship was like an old wound that scars over but never really heals. I did not know what happened to my mother and my sisters over the years and I told myself I did not care, even though Colin had told me often enough that the first duty of those who walk in the Light was to seek clarity within.
For if we do not, that clarity will seek us out, with painful results.
To this day I don't know how Gail found me. But my eldest sister had always possessed a maddening persistence in going after what she wanted, especially when she thought she might cause someone else pain through it, and I suppose that honest, law-abiding citizens aren't particularly hard to find. So I picked up the bookshop phone one day in 1987 with no sense of foreboding whatever.
"Ancient Mysteries Bookshop," I said.
"Is this Claire London?" an unfamiliar voice said.
If the events of Emily's wedding had not been working their way through the back of my mind, I would probably have simply hung up the phone. Instead, I answered honestly.
"I no longer use that name," I said carefully. "I am Claire Moffat now."
"I don't care what you call yourself," she said, and now, with an absolute thrill of horror, I recognized Gail's voice. "Mother's dead. I thought you'd like to know."
Why? was the only thought in my mind. For a strange disjointed moment, the only thing I could think of was that she'd told me so that I would no longer worry that someday Mother might simply reappear in my life, but Gail had never been that kind.
"When is the service?" I found myself asking. Ah, the things that courtesy will lead us to!
She gave me a date and time and told me she would send directions, and then hung up before I could collect my scattered wits enough to ask her how Mother had died. When the directions came—to the bookstore, of course; I had enough instinct for self-preservation not to give Gail my home address— I was certain I would not go. It was Cassie who convinced me I must.
"Better go and make sure she's dead," she said with gallows humor. I suppose I was not the only person in America who had ever been estranged from their family, but one's own problems always seem unique.
But good things come at the most unexpected times. I met my cousin, Rowan Moorcock, at my mother's funeral.
I was a nervous wreck by the day of the funeral. Thank heavens Colin ha< kept his driver's license—he had to drive me to Petaluma, and once we got there I begged him not to come in with me. It seemed so important then that these two streams of my life not cross. I suppose I must have seemed half-demented, but he was very patient with me. To this day, I do not know how I found the physical courage to mount the steps of the funeral parlor and walk inside.
Gail pounced on me the moment I entered the room reserved for the London party and dragged me up to the coffin to pay my "last respects." It was hard to reconcile the thing inside—wasted by age and alcohol, and, as Gail wasted no time in telling me now that she could see my reaction, cancer— with the monster who had stalked my childhood and adolescence.
I turned away from the coffin, and would probably have run from the room if someone else hadn't come up to me at that moment.
"Claire?"
The speaker was a plump woman in her fifties, her hair a bright artificial gold. With a certain amount of disbelief, I recognized my middle sister Janet j beneath the mask of adulthood.
"Hello, Janet." I desperately wanted to flee this terrible place—I, who had faced demons and Satanists and creatures beyond all human understanding.
She hugged me. It was as if we had never met—two strangers playing the part of fond siblings without acknowledgment of our past—and dragged me . away from Gail and over to another knot of mourners.
"And this is Uncle Clarence—you were named for him," Janet told me.
I simply stared. It had never occurred to me—never!—that Mother had any relatives, or would have wished to acknowledge them in any way. She had I always cut herself and her children off from the world, a tiny, self-contained I unit of torment.
Uncle Clarence introduced me to his grandson—my cousin—Justin Moorcock, and to Justin's daughter, Rowan.
She must have been somewhere in her early teens, and had that glowing farmgirl healthiness that is often more compelling than beauty. Her long hair I was a lovely rich red-gold, braided and pinned up atop her head, giving her I something of the look of a Saxon princess. She stared at everything around I her with a sort of trapped terrorized look I knew from personal experience; I the look of one trying to hold on to their concentration and their sanity in the I midst of a raging tumult.
"Hello, Rowan," I said, holding out my hand to her.
Her fingers were icy cold, and I found myself drawing on strength I didn't know I possessed, willing it into her. My heart lifted as I saw her face relax.
At that point we were all seated for the service. I remember nothing of what happened then, only Rowan clinging to me as if I could save her from drowning.
Afterward, the mourners were ushered out to the waiting limousines, to accompany the coffin to the cemetery. Of course there was no place for me— Gail had seen to that, vindictive to the last—but with Rowan clinging to me like grim death, she couldn't just tell me to leave.
It was my newfound Uncle Clarence—in every way his sister's opposite— who suggested that Rowan could ride with me to the cemetery. And so poor Colin found himself drafted into the funeral procession, with Rowan leaning 'over the backseat, her head on my shoulder, the whole way there.
At the end, when Rowan was reluctantly separated from me by her father, she clung to me as if I was an old friend. In one sense it was true; instinctively I knew that we shared that Gift which makes strangers as close as sisters, bound together by that cursed blessing of seeing what others cannot.
"You'll come and visit us, won't you, Cousin Claire?" Rowan asked me, as 'if she were far younger than her years. "Won't you?"
Of course I said yes. And had I known then what would come of that promise, my answer would have been just the same.
TWENTY-ONE
SHADOWKILL, NEW YORK, MARCH 1990
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth Askance and strangely; but, by all above, These blenches gave my heart another youth, And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love. — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
IT WAS TWO O'CLOCK, AND COLIN HAD HOPED TO MAKE BOSTON BEFORE the start of the rush-hour traffic, but instead he found himself making a detour.
Claire had been against the idea of him driving across country—at his age, she'd said, with some tart comments about second childhoods and people with histories of heart disease. But Colin was well aware, these days, of the limits of his strength, and knew that he did not have many more years like this one left to him. He'd wanted to revisit old familiar places while there was still time.
And more than that, he'd wanted the time to take stock. After Simon's rescue, Colin had once more retreated from the search that would have brought him a disciple, yet Alison Margrave's posthumous distress had been a keen lesson to him of his own need to find a student who could learn what he had . to teach—and soon.
But who?
Hunter Greyson had been the most promising candidate Colin had seen in I decades, and Grey had thrown his future away and vanished. Frodo Fredricks was committed to the Wiccan Path. None of the young men who drifted in and out of the bookstore had the determination, the discipline, and the calling to embrace Colin's Path.
Yet what a tragedy it would be if he should die with a successor untrained, without the repayment that every Adept must make for the teaching he himself had been given.
And Colin, in his life, had had many teachers. . . .
Though he'd been here only once, twenty years ago, Co
lin found his way without difficulty to the little village of Shadowkill—an archetypal Hudson River town, with rambling Victorian mansions grouped around a picture-perfect town park. He drove past the war memorial and down County 13— Main Street—to the place where Main Street formed a T with Old Patent Grant Road.
To Shadow's Gate.
The gatehouse was straight ahead, but the entrance was blocked by the running fence that edged Old Patent Grant Road. No Trespassing signs were posted every few feet, but this section of the fence-—and the building beyond it—was heavily defaced with graffiti, and someone had made a halfhearted attempt to spray-paint the North Gate Sigil in the center of the road.
Thorne Blackburn was still remembered.
Colin pulled his car over to the side of the road and stopped, staring through the windshield at the miniature castle. The gatehouse building formed an arch across the drive: even from here Colin could see that the iron gates within that arch were chained and padlocked shut, the drive scoured of gravel and choked with weeds from two decades of neglect. The property was deserted, left to rot while the miles of red tape surrounding it and its gone-but-not-definitely-dead owner slowly unfurled, and Thorne Blackburn's long-suffering lawyers filed petitions and disbursed tax payments. If not for that, Shadow's Gate and its hundred-acre wood would have been sold off years ago.
It was unlikely that any of Thorne's half-dozen surviving children—all illegitimate—could lay claim to the estate. Except for Katherine Jourdemayne's girl, they had all vanished into the foster-care system and might not even know, today, who their father had been.
If he had not repudiated Thorne, would the outcome have been any different? Could he have kept the boy from heading so far down that dark path— or at least prevented the deaths?
Colin opened the door and climbed out, pulling up the collar of his coat against the icy March wind. There was no sound of traffic; only the sound of the wind through the ice-covered tree branches. He crossed the road and leaned upon the fence. Why had he come here? What did he hope to find?
Absolution?
The house itself was a mile or so away, invisible from the road. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but desolation, rust, and neglect. Thorne was gone, along with the flower-children of the Aquarian Summerland in which he had flourished. All that remained was the fact of what he had tried to do, and those disciples who still endeavored to complete his work.
At least Thorne has disciples, Colin thought, unable to resist making the rueful observation.
Facing Thorne's memory across the gulf of years Colin wondered—had what Thorne tried to do been so very wrong? It was no longer possible to remember exactly what that had been—or to summon the moral certainty that had allowed him to fashion such easy judgments.
It seemed so easy now to say that humanity had taken the wrong path. To say that mankind had needed—still needed—such strong measures to save it. But what would Thorne say today? Would he simply say now—as he had then—that there was never a last chance?
But Thorne's time had passed, and the corruption that had seemed so shocking two decades ago had become just another acceptable loss of innocence. Thorne was dead, and Colin would never know how his story might have ended.
Thoroughly chilled, he retreated to his car and drove back toward the Taconic Parkway, heading north.
TWENTY-TWO
ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, MARCH 1990
I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour 'd of them all. . .
— ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
THE TOWN OF ARKHAM IN MASSACHUSETTS WAS, LIKE THE TAGHKANIC campus in New York, a tiny pocket of the nineteenth century marooned in the depths of the twentieth. The ivy-covered Miskatonic campus was surrounded by ancient New England mansions that had been moldering in earnest since the end of the first World War, and only a few touches of the twentieth century—a supermarket; a steakhouse along the main road that took most of its business from through traffic; a line of tourist cabins for a clientele that had never really materialized—invaded the comalike slumber of the town.
Arkham, like the people of the rural communities which surrounded it— Innsmouth, Whateley's Crossing, Madison Corners—was content to have things so. The people who had fled to this haunted wild land three centuries before asked little more of their neighbors than to be left alone to do as they always had, and to a great extent the modern world had continued to respect their wishes.
The first time Colin had come here, Sara Latimer had been dead for two years.
Miskatonic University was nobody's notion of a first-rank college; it graduated farmers, public health workers, accountants, and homemakers from its two- and four-year programs, and those who asked for more from the halls of academe usually sought it at Harvard, MIT, or Brown University in Rhode Island. Miskatonic offered only one graduate-level program, but those few dedicated souls who wished to take Miskatonic's degree in Esoteric Ethnography came from all over the world.
Colin had lectured here on the Folklore of New England every summer for the last five years, and few suspected his real reason for returning over and over to the Arkham countryside. Now, unfortunately, it seemed that the time was nearing for action. It was 1990, and Sara Latimer had been dead for seven years.
The locals had called her a witch.
They were right. Old Sara Latimer—known as Witch-Sara through most of the surrounding farms—had been the High Priestess of something called the Church of the Antique Rite.
Coincidentally, Colin had known several of old Sara's descendants for years. Paul Latimer, a professor at Columbia, was a tenant in Colin's building in New York. Colin doubted that any of the Latimers knew of their illustrious New England bloodline, or of the fact that there had been Latimers in this part of Massachussets since the 1600s—all tainted by accusations of a witchcraft far less benign than the modern Wiccan sort.
Years ago, Nathaniel Atheling had given Colin what they'd used to call a "watching brief." It was light work, but no sinecure, and it had come to him because Colin had already been familiar with the Church of the Antique Rite. Hunter Greyson had done a research paper on it during his years at Taghkanic.
The Antique Rite had flourished in the New World atmosphere of religious autonomy—if not precisely tolerance—which characterized the pre-Revolutionary period, when almost anyone who could charter a ship could j found a settlement in which to practice his own particular variety of religion with minimal hindrance from Church and Crown. As late as the turn of the century its rites had been actively practiced all across old New England.
As far as most people knew, World War I had brought an end to the cult, as it had to so many other things. A new generation, dazzled by hot jazz, strong drink, and the lure of city lights, had little time for the cumbersome j paraphernalia of the past, and so the Antique Rite had simply died out.
In most places.
On Colin's first visit, it had taken him less than a week to discover that a coven of the Antique Right was still meeting out near Madison Corners.
It engaged in the same sort of activities that witches had been accused of for centuries: drinking, drugs, gluttony, orgies, ill-wishing their neighbors, J petty theft. But none of these acts was the sort of crime that fell within Colin's purview—the coven's magick was weak, and its members seemed to meet more for recreation than for any other purpose.
But perhaps all that would change in the seventh year since Sara Latimers death.
This year, as usual, Colin spent the first few days settling into the tourist cabin on the outskirts of Arkham and renewing his friendships among members of the Miskatonic Ethnography Department. He found himself out of | breath more than usual, and marked it down to the sedentary life he'd fallen into in San Francisco. He promised himself that he'd take more exercise while he was here, and even make a date to see his doctor when he
got home. Fortunately Colin had given up smoking years before. But there was no point in taking up the time of the local GP—even if the boy did have a bright shiny new diploma from Johns Hopkins. All a doctor would do was tell Colin things he already knew: eat right and exercise, take aspirin and hope that another "cardiac event" did not lie in his future.
And meanwhile, there was too much to do to let a little fatigue stand in his way. Claire would be coming in a few weeks to pay a first visit to her cousins in nearby Madison Corners.
Colin had been a little disturbed to find that the Moorcock family lived so near the trouble spot that Nathaniel had set him to watch over, but Claire's instincts were sound as always, and if she had taken to Rowan Moorcock and her family there was no possibility that they could be tainted.
Claire had always been so cool and unflappable, an oasis of cheerful common sense no matter the chaos that surrounded her, that to see her at her mother's funeral, transfixed not by grief but by rage, had been a painful sight. Colin was pleased to think that Claire could make peace with some portion of her past. Her friendship with her young cousin Rowan seemed to have done her a world of good—Colin thought that Rowan replaced, at least in part, the family that she had hoped for with Peter and never had.
She and Rowan had written back and forth for over a year before this visit, and Colin had to admit to himself that he had particularly encouraged her to visit this summer, as it would be useful to him to have Claire on the spot to function as his Sensitive, should it be necessary.
Privately, he hoped it would not be.
At the beginning of April Colin settled in to his series of lectures. Miskatonic had an excellent library; the special collection was closed to undergraduate use, but Colin was able to put his time there to good use, refreshing his memory about Les Cultes des Goules, the sourcebook for the Church of the Antique Rite. The Cults of the Ghouls had been called "a nasty little grimoire" over two centuries ago by one of the more decadent French ecclesiastics—and perfectly deserved the title, in Colin's opinion.
Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 Page 46