Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 01, page 4
And she'd thought it had all been done for love of Katherine, Truth mocked herself bleakly. Wrong.
She didn't love me. She loved him. Truth heard the cheated little-girl voice inside her mind and could not force it down. Aunt Caroline had loved Thorne Blackburn. Still. Now. Always. If she had hated him she would not have been there, always there—and there the one night the two of them—the three of them—had needed her most.
And when, in her teens, Truth had begun to know who he had been and to speak out against Thorne Blackburn, Aunt Caroline had never said a word.
Hoping I'd change my mind? There'll be blizzards in Hell first, Truth thought grimly. The grief growing in her was too deep for words.
He's taken everything. He left me nothing.
Not her mother, not her mother's love—not even, in the end, her aunt's. It had all, all, all been for Thorne Blackburn, and nothing for his daughter.
Nothing. Nothing left. No time . . .
There was one more thing in the box.
A book.
She lifted it out carefully. It was about nine inches by twelve—a little larger than a modern hardcover book—and about two inches thick. There was no dust jacket, and it was bound in smooth black leather, with the sort of hubbed spine that Truth associated with the antique books in the Taghkanic College library.
But this was not an antique book—nor, as she discovered when she opened it, a printed book at all.
The title page was handwritten in black ink in a sweeping hand. It said: Venus Afflicted: Being a Discourse on the True Rite for the Opening of the Way and Other Matters. Thorne Blackburn.
Truth flipped through it quickly. The pages were covered with writing in a neat, modern hand, occasionally interspersed with elaborate drawings by the same hand.
/t must be some kind of spellbook, Truth thought numbly. She dropped it back into the box, rubbing her hands together as if she'd touched something dirty. To foster a belief in magic in this modern day and age seemed too much to Truth like a deliberate turning away from rationalism into the dark ignorance of the past. If magic, then why not faith healing and infant sacrifice as well?
Thorne Blackburn had dedicated his life to obliterating the only weapon humankind had against the universe—the power of the mind—as if he were some demonic quisling of unreason.
And Aunt Caroline had loved him. Had saved this—this thing for twenty-five years, just so she could someday present it to Truth.
As if it were a gift—as if it were something Truth should want.
Truth scooped the ring and the necklace back into the box and set the lid back on it. Trembling, she ran her hand through her short, sensible hairdo. Her wan, sickened face gazed back at her from the dresser mirror.
How could she face Aunt Caroline? She could not bear to seem unkind to the woman who had raised her—but how could they have any kind of rational discussion if Caroline Jourdemayne thought Thorne Blackburn and his nasty occult silliness was admirable?
There was no way.
Truth sighed deeply, suddenly exhausted. After a long moment she reluctantly picked up the box and went back into the living room.
"Aunt Caroline?"
The old woman was lying on the couch, head thrown back and eyes closed. In sleep she looked even more ghastly; looking at her, Truth could almost see the progress of the terrible disease that ate at her. At Truth's voice, Aunt Caroline roused slightly.
"Ah, there you are." Her eyes searched Truth's face hopefully. Truth knew what Aunt Caroline was hoping to see and fought to conceal her real feelings. Arguing about Blackburn now would be no kindness.
"We have to talk—about the others—" Aunt Caroline said. Her eyes fluttered closed; with a great effort of will she forced them open again. "When . . . when Katherine died there was so much confusion, so much chaos. I did all that I thought I could, but I failed the others, Truth, that's why—" her voice trailed off.
"Aunt Caroline, you're so tired," Truth said quickly. "You really should lie down and rest. Of course you haven't failed anybody. I'm sure everything's going to be fine." The hasty words rang loudly false in the room.
Aunt Caroline shook her head as if even that small motion hurt. "There were others," she said again, her voice fading.
"We can talk about them later," Truth said, cravenly hoping that later would never come.
"You must find the others. The others need you. The boy ..." Aunt Caroline said, her voice heavy with the drug. As Truth stood watching, the older woman's eyes slowly closed again. Truth lifted her aunt's feet onto the couch and covered her with an afghan, making her as comfortable as she could. She did not wish to risk hurting Aunt Caroline further by carrying her into the bedroom, though, looking at the frail, wasted form, Truth knew she could lift her easily.
As she watched, Aunt Caroline's breathing slowed and deepened into restoring sleep. Truth picked up the pill bottle. DEMEROL, the label said. ONE EVERY SIX HOURS, AS NEEDED FOR PAIN. But Aunt Caroline had taken two. It would be hours before she awoke again.
Truth felt a keen sense of relief, and acknowledged guiltily that she was grateful not to have to listen to what her aunt had to say about events a quarter of a century in the past. Aunt Caroline was confused, that was all. There was no one to find; no one to help. Blackburn's misguided followers had scattered to the four winds, and Truth Jourdemayne certainly had no intention of aiding any of them, even if they needed it.
She stared around the room and, after a moment's hesitation, picked up Aunt Caroline's address book from the end table by the phone. Here, as she'd hoped, was the number of the visiting nurse who was to look in on Aunt Caroline. A quick phone call arranged for a visit in a few hours. The nurse already had a house key.
Truth scribbled a hasty note and left it on the coffee table where Aunt Caroline or the nurse would see it. Then, pausing only to retrieve her coat, purse, and the hateful box, she walked quickly from the house where Caroline Jourdemayne slept the heavy drugged sleep of the terminally ill and Katherine and Blackburn's pictures kept watch over the past.
How could she do it? The question remained unanswered as Truth piloted her Saturn along the rutted back roads of Stormlakken in the direction of the Thruway. She supposed she ought to have offered to stay, but she hadn't made arrangements to be away from the Institute for more than the day, and she found she was reluctant to spend any more time than she must in the house that now seemed so imbued with Thorne Blackburn's harlequin presence.
To be entirely honest, she could not bear to stay there now that she knew what Caroline Jourdemayne's feelings for Thorne Blackburn were, and she could not bear to hurt her aunt by revealing her own feelings.
From the very beginning, Truth had always respected Aunt Caroline's mind, had patterned her maturing personality on Aunt Caroline's model. How could someone she had always trusted to be right be so wrong about Thorne Blackburn?
That she was wrong Truth had no doubt. But it wasn't Aunt Caroline's fault. It was his. Thorne Blackburn's. Somehow he'd managed to work his charlatan spell even on Caroline Jourdemayne.
It wasn't fair. Unhappiness roiled Truth's stomach and brought on the outriders of a pounding headache.
No. It was more than simply not fair. It was not right.
Truth's life, in its small way, had been dedicated to supporting Right. Sometimes it was hard to tell right from wrong, but not this time. The faerie glamour that Blackburn had worked over the lives of those who had known him, overriding common sense and human decency, was wrong. It had not even ended with his death; it persisted even now, years after Blackburn was vanished and gone, continuing to work its subtle harm.
She had to stop it.
She had to stop Blackburn, by breaking the illusion that he'd cast, and what better way than by telling the truth—the whole, final, real truth about Thorne Blackburn.
Trust cast a triumphant glance at the white box on the seat beside her. So you left me a book, did you, Father? Well, I have a book in mind worth two of yours.
"You're going to do what?" Dylan Palmer said incredulously.
"I'm going to write a biography of Thorne Blackburn," Truth repeated.
It was ten-thirty on Thursday morning. Truth sat on the edge of the desk in Dylan's office, swinging one foot back and forth while watching his reaction to her announcement.
"What are you going to call it: 'Magus Dearest'? For heaven's sake, Truth!" Dylan peered at her as if he were not quite sure whether or not she was joking. His wheat-colored hair fell in an unruly comma over his forehead.
In contrast to Truth's efficient tidiness, Dylan's office, like its occupant, possessed a rumpled and friendly informality. Dylan's workspace was a riot of souvenirs and evidence, letters and papers and books. A number of reproduction gargoyles mounted on the walls lent a certain piquancy to the whole. There was a Ghostbusters movie poster on the back of the door, and another one over the desk.
"And here I thought you'd be pleased. You're the one always telling me that Blackburn's a seminal figure in twentieth-century occultism, heir to the crown of Aleister Crowley. And yet there are no books on him, his life and work. Well, now there will be," Truth said with satisfaction.
"And you're going to write it," Dylan said.
Now that her decision had been irrevocably announced, Truth felt happier and more confident than she could ever remember feeling. Finally she was in a position to take control of the nasty puzzle that was Thorne Blackburn.
"Yes, I'm going to write it. At least that way it will be of some use— and not filled with pseudo-factual accounts of trips to Venus and suchlike," Truth responded. She was secretly glad to have this news to break as an excuse to talk with Dylan again; it meant that they could both pretend the incident on Monday had never happened.
"Tir na Og," Dylan said unexpectedly. "The Isle of the Blessed. Thorne claimed to go there."
Claimed to go there and to Venus, Truth could have told him. Since her visit to Aunt Caroline, she'd occupied spare moments glancing through Venus Afflicted. The name, which made the book sound so much like a warning pamphlet against venereal disease, was actually a term, Truth had found, used by astrologers when the planet Venus was being unduly influenced in an astrological chart by other planets. The person with Venus afflicted in his chart would be unlucky in his relationships with others.
Truth did not approve of astrology any more than she did of so-called real magic, but she did have to admit that astrology was slightly more harmless. She wondered why Blackburn had chosen this for his title, when it was obviously others who were unlucky in their relationship with Thorne, and not the reverse. She looked back at Dylan.
Dylan had the look of a man groping for something to say. Suddenly Truth wondered if he had meant to write a biography of Thorne Blackburn. This was academia, after all—publish or perish. But even if her supposition were true, she didn't waste any sympathy on Dylan's aborted project. She was much better qualified, and had access to sources Dylan didn't.
Maybe I should call it Blood Will Tell, she thought irreverently.
Had Venus Afflicted ever been published? She hadn't told Dylan she had a copy; it was to be the climax of her book—the thing that would ensure its publication and make it a valuable piece of scholarly research as well—and she meant to keep its inclusion a secret until the last possible moment.
"Well, frankly I don't care whether he said he went to Tir na Og or Cleveland," Truth said. "All I want is the provable facts. I've got a lot of accrued vacation coming, and I'm taking it. Three months ought to be enough time to sort out reality from fiction."
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple, so says Oscar Wilde," Dylan commented. "And what are you going to do with your truth when you find it?"
"I'm going to write it down. I don't see why people should glamorize Thorne Blackburn when they'd be appalled if they really knew the things he did."
Dylan gave her a steady look.
"Are you sure it will make a difference? Look at either of the Kennedys, at King, at Elvis. The more dirt people dish out about them, the stronger their hold becomes on the public imagination. How can you think your book will be any different?"
"I don't know," Truth had to admit. "But at least /'// have the whole truth." Suddenly she felt the need to convince him that what she was doing was right—and not just a petty act of vengeance. "If I wait too much longer, Dyl, the primary sources—the people who knew him— will all be dead."
"If he were alive today he'd be in his sixties," Dylan agreed. "But where are you going to start? Out in California? England?"
"Oh, no," Truth said. "I'm starting closer to home than that. I'm starting where it all really began—or ended." She took a deep breath and said the words: "I'm going to Shadow's Gate."
CHAPTER THREE
THE CIRCLE OF TRUTH
Truth, poor child, was nobody's daughter She took off her clothes and jumped in the water
—DOROTHY L. SAYERS
IT WAS THE SECOND WEEK IN OCTOBER; PEAK SEASON FOR THE LEAF color in the Hudson Valley. Oaks, maples, birch, and poplars all turned their separate spectra of amber and gold against a sky so blue it hurt the eyes. And Truth was bound for Shadow's Gate.
It had been mildly surprising to discover that Blackburn had not been responsible for the quintessentially Gothic name of his last residence, nor had he fictionalized the name of the nearby town in his published essays. Shadowkill was a real place, the stream from which it took its name having been named by Dutch homesteader Elkanah Scheidow in 1641: Scheidow's Kill—kill being the perfectly ordinary Dutch word for "stream," appearing in Hudson Valley place-names from Peekskill to Plattekill.
When English settlers displaced the Dutch in this area, Scheidow's Kill became Anglicized to Shadowkill and became the name of the new English town, and Scheidowgehucht—"Scheidow's Hamlet"—became Shadow's Gate, a name now attached only to the estate outside the little village. Thus a spooky and theatrical taxonomy dissolved under the press of a little research into something perfectly ordinary and nonfrightening.
And damned elusive.
She'd gotten the name of the attorneys handling Blackburn's estate— and therefore the property—from the newspaper stories that covered his 1969 disappearance, but her letters and phone calls to them asking for help and information—and permission to visit the house—had gone unanswered. Still, Truth didn't think there would be any problem with just climbing over the fence and taking a walk around. And as Blackburn's daughter, even if illegitimate, she might be said to have some claim on the place.
The thought disturbed her. She didn't want anything from Blackburn, not his arcane book, not his ritual jewelry, not his—what was the phrase one of her nutcase correspondents had used? Oh, yes—not his mantle of mystic authority. Truth snorted derisively at the memory.
But she did want to see the house. She remembered nothing of the time she'd spent at Shadow's Gate; the memories of her earliest childhood. Perhaps there was something she could reclaim for herself in this journey: her history.
Almost a month had gone by while she applied for and received the leave of absence from the Institute, followed by the distasteful business of actually trying to locate some hard biographical information on Thorne Blackburn. She had spoken to Aunt Caroline on the phone a couple of times, but Aunt Caroline had not mentioned Thorne Blackburn again, or the legacy, and for that Truth was grateful.
While she'd waited for her leave to be approved, Truth collected and reviewed the material on Blackburn that she'd read when she first became aware of him, and found it was even scantier than she'd thought. There had only been the briefest of mentions in Colin Wilson's The Occult, and Richard Cavendish's Man, Myth, and Magic had little more. When she looked at her notes after a week's hard work, they were laughably cryptic.
Thorne Blackburn, probably born circa 1939, birthplace unknown— possibly England—family unknown, early life unknown. First surfaced in New Orleans in the late 1950s, where he was doing fake voodoo rituals for the tourists—a phase of his career that hadn't lasted long—and claiming to be the Conte de Cagliostro, an eighteenth-century French con artist who'd claimed to be a thousand years old. Claims notwithstanding, Thorne had been somewhere around thirty when he died—Dylan was right; he'd be in his sixties if he were alive today.
Already well established as an occultist when he resurfaced in San Francisco in the early 1960s, Blackburn had claimed affiliation both to the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Golden Dawn. He'd made a big splash with his lectures, public rituals, and the publication of what they, in those innocent days, had called an "underground newspaper"—dedicated to Blackburn's cult, of course, and his bizarre New Age theories.
And that was that. There the story of Blackburn's life—and death— ended.
Her library request for newspaper stories on Blackburn had netted Truth a folder full of copies of microfilmed newspaper stories, none of them of much particular use beyond providing the name of the lawyer. Most of them focused on the April 1969 disappearance. Katherine Jourdemayne's death was listed as "suspected drug overdose." Police had searched for Thorne but he'd never been found; other members of the Circle had been held for a while and then released. There had been no arrests.
It was a trail a quarter of a century cold, but maybe she could unriddle it—if she visited Shadow's Gate.
Truth didn't understand where the conviction had come from that her answers were there—the estate was deserted, after all, left to rot while the miles of red tape surrounding it and its gone-but-not-definitely-dead owner reeled onward like a legal battle in a Dickens novel. If not for that, Shadow's Gate and its hundred-acre wood would have been sold off years ago, Truth assumed. But she had to go there.
It had seemed simpler back at the Institute. Truth stared out her car's windshield in despair, at what looked like just another Dutchess County back road. She'd been driving all morning, and by now she was nearly ready to admit she was lost.
