Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (38 page)

 
          
"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 play 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.

 
          
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.

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.