Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  "After the war, of course, all sorts of rumors grew up around it, including the urban folklore that Hitler had himself been a member of one of the Thule Lodges, and that the entire Holocaust had been planned and performed under orders from his occult superiors. Of course, if it ever had existed, it must have been destroyed by Hitler's own purges of the occult Lodges in the thirties and forties," Dylan said.

  "I think you know that isn't true, Dylan," Colin said, rousing himself to speech with an effort. There was no point in letting Dylan go on telling him things he already knew far too well out of sheer nerves. "Whatever the Thule Group originally was, it later became a part of the Ahnenerfte, and it survived the fall of Berlin essentially intact, just as so much of the Nazi power structure did."

  Through the connection Colin could almost hear the disbelief, the resistance to what he said.

  "That's over fifty years ago. Even if some of them survived, surely they simply disbanded. What was there left for them to work for? They'd lost the war. ..."

  "Sometimes I wonder if that war ever really ended," Colin said, half to himself. "Believe me, Dylan: the Lodge—the original Lodge, the one directly descended from the one List founded—survives today. And it's still fighting for the goals of the Third Reich. Now tell me—how is Rowan involved?"

  "Her dissertation topic was 'The Evolution of Trance Mediumship as an Instrument of Nazi Theocracy.'" Dylan took a deep breath, as if wondering how best to go on.

  Colin waited, gripping the phone tightly, as if he thought it might try to get away.

  "Well, almost immediately she turned up the contemporary would-be Thulists—the groups that date back to the sixties and later—the mystical branch of the Klan; various kinds of back-engineered neo-Nazi nonsense. And I told her to stay completely away from them. They're nothing but bad news—and more to the point for Rowan's purposes, they're neo-Nazi, and have nothing to do with the Third Reich. . . ."

  Get on with it, Colin urged mentally, but he could sense that there was information that Dylan could simply not bring himself to reveal over the phone.

  "So you told her to drop it. And naturally she did what you said," Colin said neutrally.

  But if she had, why would you have called me?

  Dylan met him at the small local airport. The drive back to Glastonbury passed in uncharacteristic silence; Colin was occupied with his own thoughts. It was impossible to reconcile the sassy, bouncy, young woman he'd seen at Dylan's wedding last year with someone motivated and willing to go into battle against monsters whose supposed defeat lay half a century in her past.

  If, in fact, that had been what she was doing. If she'd taken her work seriously enough to know how dangerous—how real—those monsters could be.

  Colin prayed that she understood the stakes of the game she'd been playing. For her own sake.

  The apartment was located over a shop in downtown Glastonbury, only a block or two away from Inquire Within. While he was opening the door, Dylan explained—again—that Rowan had left her keys with a student named Val Graves whom she'd hired to look after her plants and bring in her mail. Rowan had paid Val for three months—in advance.

  So she intended to disappear. Is that a good sign? I hope to Heaven it is.

  Colin looked around the apartment, hoping to find some clue that Dylan had missed. It was a typical student apartment, though Rowan had long since moved out of student housing; the only item that looked as if it had been bought new was the stereo.

  The uncurtained window overlooking the street was filled with plants; some hanging, some on shelves. All looked lush and cared-for. Framed posters covered the walls—most of them in the wearily realistic style of modern fantasy art: dragons, knights, tough-looking young women in tattoos and leather. There was a bowlful of multisided dice on the bookcase next to the stereo; Rowan Moorcock, it appeared, was an aficionado of the dice-driven role-playing games that had become most people's modern metaphor for magick and the Unseen World.

  Despite the messy disorder of the living room, it did not seem to have been searched. They haven't backtracked her here, then, Colin thought. Or perhaps they didn't need to.

  Dylan was leafing through the pile of unopened mail on the corner of the couch, oblivious to Colin.

  "Let's go over it again, Dylan," Colin said. "You told me that Rowan had chosen the Thule Gesellschaft for her dissertation topic. Now she's gone. And she didn't say where she was going?" Colin asked. "You've checked with her friends?"

  "Nobody knows where she is," Dylan repeated doggedly. "She didn't say anything to Val—the kid she asked to take care of her apartment. Just handed over the money and said she might be in and out."

  "What did Truth make of all this?" Colin asked. Though her path was not quite his own, Truth was a magician of considerable power, and her insight would be helpful.

  "I haven't told her," Dylan admitted reluctantly. "She's still in England— I don't know what she can do from there and I didn't want to call her back. ..." Dylan hesitated, his unspoken dilemma plain. Truth might be able to help, but to call her back would be inevitably to involve her in the same danger he feared Rowan had fallen into. But not to call her would be to do less than was possible to save Rowan. He understood Dylan's reluctance far better than Dylan might ever realize—either course of action led to jeopardy, not for himself, but for someone he loved. How could an ethical man choose who to risk?

  "Bills . . . checks—she wouldn't have just gone off and left all this stuff." Dylan ran a hand distractedly through his hair. There were dark smudges of sleeplessness beneath his blue eyes.

  "Dylan," Colin said, a slight edge to his voice.

  Dylan looked up at him, his expression that of a man fighting—and failing—to disbelieve in the fact that something had gone horribly wrong. His shoulders slumped as he surrendered.

  "This spring—May? June?—Miles got a string of odd phone calls: people asking questions about Rowan and being very mysterious when he asked questions back. Not just one person, either, but several different people over a period of weeks. He talked to me about it—I even called one of them. He said he was doing a background check on Rowan in connection with an employment interview." Dylan grimaced. If he'd ever believed the unknown man's explanation, he no longer did.

  "Do you remember any names?" Colin asked.

  Dylan shrugged. "I think I made notes; I'll see if I can dig them up. Of course neither Miles nor I gave out any information, but the whole thing was just weird enough that I braced Rowan with it. She got very upset and admitted that she'd been getting involved with what I gathered at the time were some of the less-savory modern secret societies." Dylan closed his eyes for a moment, and tossed the envelopes back on the couch as if they no longer mattered.

  "Colin, I could have strangled her on the spot, I swear it. I demanded that she ditch the Thulists and choose a new topic for her thesis—I swore I'd kick her out of the program, get her blacklisted in the field if she went on meddling with that stuff. She told me she'd gotten in over her head and all that and had learned better. She picked a new subject for her thesis—that's what I thought she'd sent in—but when I read it, it wasn't about trance psychism in nineteenth-century America. It was this."

  Dylan opened his briefcase and dropped a thick spiral-bound manuscript onto the couch. This, then, was what Dylan had not been able to bring himself to talk about on the phone, the thing that had frightened him enough to call Colin in.

  Colin picked it up. The pages inside the cardboard covers crackled mutely in his hands as if they were erasable bond. Colin opened the front cover and flipped to the first page. The surface was faintly wavy, as if the paper had been damp at some point, and here and there the letters were blurred.

  Ultima Thule: The Thousand-Year Reich and the Corruption of the American Dream.

  She knows. The cold pain in his chest had nothing to do with physical weakness and everything to do with fear. It was as if his deepest nightmares had been placed into print—and anoth
er innocent was poised for sacrifice.

  "Not trance psychism," Colin observed evenly.

  "I saw that title, and that was when I went looking for Rowan—and didn't find her," Dylan said. "Though I suppose it's just as well—I don't know what I would have done, I was so worried about what she'd gotten into. But I kept looking, and after a while I realized that nobody had seen her for weeks. And then I sat down and read what she'd written—and at that point I panicked and called you."

  "Not an unreasonable reaction, all things considered," Colin said. "You're one of the few people alive who know something of the work I did in the forties."

  "This is ... bad," Dylan said inadequately, sitting down on the couch and putting his head in his hands.

  Colin looked down at him pityingly for a moment before walking into the tiny kitchen alcove. Something was nagging at the back of his mind; best to try to ignore it and let it surface as it would. Rowan had found her way into the shadow-world of Nazi occultism—and had developed, Colin was starting to believe, a healthy fear of her subject. But she'd persisted in her investigations, and now she was gone.

  Where? And was she still alive?

  He poked around the kitchen absently. The refrigerator was empty of perishables—a lonely bottle of lemon juice shared the shelves with a jar of pickles and a box of Parmesan cheese. The note from Rowan instructing her apartment-sitter to take the other things away was still stuck to the freezer with a magnet in the shape of a wizard-costumed teddy bear.

  She'd had the time to make arrangements to disappear, but the fact that the apartment had not been ransacked worried Colin. If the people she feared were still looking for her, surely they would have come here to try to pick up leads, just as Colin had?

  Or was it no longer necessary for them to do so?

  Colin opened the freezer, and found it stocked with the usual things one might expect to find in a freezer—no meat, but a wide array of frozen vegetables and grains and a half-finished carton of Breyer's ice cream.

  "What are you doing? She isn't hiding in the refrigerator," Dylan said, following him into the kitchen.

  "You called me because you wanted my help," Colin said shortly, closing the freezer. "Now let me work."

  He sifted the known facts through his mind once more, as if they could produce new information. She found what she was looking for—the Thule Group. And they found her—checked up on her, either following references she'd given them or backtracking her themselves. She knew they were after her when she decided to disappear. Did she realize how far they were willing to go?

  He had to assume so—and assume, too, that she had not simply fled to the imagined safety of home. The care she had taken to keep her departure a mystery encouraged Colin to believe she had. For if she had not, Claire and Justin were in deadly danger as well.

  A cursory examination of the kitchen shelves revealed nothing out of the ordinary, and the bathroom contained nothing that a healthy young woman might not own. Nothing in either room had been disturbed, so far as Colin could tell.

  He walked into the bedroom.

  The first thing he saw was Rowan's altar in the corner of the room. Four items lay on a white cloth. The water in the offering bowl was long evaporated, the rose petals that had floated on its surface dried to a brown film at the bottom. The matching dish still contained a mixture of rock salt and quartz pebbles, representing alchemical Earth. The only other items on the small table were a covered incense burner and an oil lamp. Hanging over the altar in the aspect of an icon was a framed print of one of the Hubble photos: a glorious nebula, tinged with shades of gold, fuchsia, and vermilion. There was nothing else on, around, or under the altar.

  The books in this room were far less innocuous than those in the living room. Colin recognized several titles from his own library: the Kybalion, the Arbatel, an edition of the Tesoraria d'Oro.

  A copy of Mein Kampf. Colin picked it up, paging through it. The book had been heavily underlined and annotated.

  "Is this her handwriting?" Colin asked, handing it to Dylan.

  "Yes," Dylan said, barely looking. "Look, Colin, I know I shouldn't have called you. You've got to take it easy these days—Claire would kill me if anything happened to you. But if you have any idea of where I can start looking—"

  "Not yet," Colin said shortly. The comment about his health—justified as it was—irritated him. His life was not so precious to him that he would choose to preserve it rather than to help where help was needed. All men died in their time.

  He sat down on the bed and pulled out the drawer of the file cabinet that served Rowan as a bedside table. The bottom drawer was filled with folders that had names like "World Church of the Creator" and "White Aryan Resistance"—all of which apparently indicated dead ends in her research. A folder marked "Thule Society" contained only the familiar—and scanty— historical references from the standard texts, copied and heavily underlined and annotated with Rowan's cryptic marginal notes.

  Colin glanced over them. "Hess a member?"; "Spandau Lodge"; "Templar link—extermination of Freemasons." He riffled through the rest of the folders in her files, but found nothing that looked useful.

  Sanitized. Nothing here, not even the notes for the dissertation she sent Dylan.

  Colin sighed, getting to his feet. "You're just lucky she . . ." He stopped as a sudden thought struck him. You're just lucky she mailed you a copy before it disappeared, too. But. . .

  "Dylan, when did you get Rowan's dissertation?"

  Dylan stared at him as if he were mad, then went back to the living room and brought back the binder. "September fourteenth. I made a note on the title page."

  Colin took the dissertation from him. September 14. Over a month ago. But Dylan, like any other harried professor with too much paperwork, had not thought a dissertation could be such an urgent matter.

  Until now.

  "And when was the last time anyone saw her?" he asked.

  "August," Dylan said slowly. "As far as I can be sure. Between the end of the summer session and the start of Freshmen Orientation."

  "So she mailed this a fortnight after she disappeared," Colin said. "About six weeks ago, now." Another thought struck him. "Did you spill anything on it?" He rubbed the title page between his thumb and forefinger, listening to it crackle.

  "No. It was like that when it came. It must have gotten damp in the mail. She was lucky I could read it at all; ink-jet printing dissolves when you get it wet. . . ."

  Colin walked back into the living room, riffling the pages in his hand. There was something nagging at the back of his mind.

  It was only reasonable that Rowan had destroyed her notes and drafts—or hidden them elsewhere—if she'd thought her apartment might be searched. It would keep her hunters guessing about how much, precisely, she knew. But why mail Dylan a copy of her dissertation after she'd already "disappeared"? She had to assume that Dylan was under surveillance as well—in fact, she knew he was, after he'd told her about those phone calls he'd received. But she'd taken the risk anyway. Why? To send him a message?

  Old customs, old habits half a century abandoned began to stir in the back of Colin's mind. Tricks of tradecraft that had been carefully instilled in one generation through careful training had become the prime-time entertainment of the next. How many of them had Rowan known, and how many had she used?

  "There was no note or anything with it?" Colin asked.

  "No," Dylan said slowly. "I was surprised that she'd mailed it instead of dropping it off, of course, but when I saw what it was about I figured she was just trying to stay out of my way until I'd calmed down. By the time I thought to check the postmark or anything like that, the envelope was long gone."

  Colin opened the manuscript and turned back the covers. He held up the title page, peering through it toward the light of the living room window. There were lighter marks on the paper, almost like a watermark—but who used erasable, watermarked paper to computer-print a manuscript on?

>   Dylan watched him uncertainly.

  "What is it?"

  "I'm not sure yet." Colin sniffed at the page. Did it smell faintly of lemon?

  There was a floor lamp standing by the couch; Colin removed the shade and switched it on.

  "Oh, come on, Colin, that's a copy of her dissertation!" Dylan burst out. "What are you looking for—secret messages in invisible ink?"

  "That's exactly what I'm looking for," Colin told him grimly. Invisible messages, written in an ink any agent—any person—could easily buy and legitimately possess: lemon juice. The stuff of old-time spy stories, long since passed into common currency.

  Under the heat of the lamp, straggly lines of brown text slowly appeared under the heat of the bulb. They covered the title page, written between the lines of printed text.

  "Dear Dylan. Hope you figure this out. Attached are transcripts and notes. I'm copying everything here and stashing the originals in a safe place—Nin can find the key if he looks around the place and the rest should be obvious. Somebody has to do something, and I guess it's me. 1 hope you aren't too mad" the words stopped abruptly, as if she'd meant to write more, and hadn't.

  Dylan's face was a study, caught halfway between a sense of the ridiculousness of the situation and real worry at the fear that had caused Rowan to stoop to such a method of sending her message.

  "Who's 'Nin'?" Colin asked, handing the page to Dylan. Bringing up the writing on the rest of the manuscript was going to be a long and tedious task; it would be faster to find the originals Rowan mentioned.

  "That would be Ninian Bellamy, I guess," Dylan said. "They've worked together on several occasions—they were in the graduate program together— but I wouldn't have said they were close. I suppose I'd better call him. He's still in the area."