Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (77 page)

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, Colin 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.

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.

 
          
Among
other things, the cult believed in
metempsychosis
—
that the souls of dedicated
cult members were freed by death to be reborn into new bodies, which would be
"awakened" into the memory of their previous lives by exposure to
the cult's practices.

 
          
After
seven years had passed.

 
          
The
Food King in Arkham was the largest supermarket in thirty miles, but it was
still tiny by modern standards: a relic of days gone by, when the "super"
market was only just coming into being. The refrigerator in Colin's cabin was
highly eccentric, but fortunately, the Food King was conveniently located
between his cabin and the college, so that he could buy his eggs by the
half-dozen and his milk by the pint. His mind was on what he should buy to cook
for dinner when he ran into an old friend.

           
Or to be more precise, an old friend
ran into him.

 
          
He
looked up, startled, at the impact of the other cart crashing into his, and his
instant pleasure at the sight of a familiar face turned to a feeling of rue
when he realized who it was.

 
          
I
would have sworn that Paul didn't know about his Latimer heritage
—
and if he did, that he would
have kept it from his wife and children, especially his daughter. . . .

 
          
"Why,
it's Sally Latimer, isn't it?" Colin said aloud.

 
          
Colin
had not seen her for at least a year; Sally looked thin and pale, with new
lines etched in her face as of grief or illness. She was with a young man who
looked vaguely familiar, though Colin couldn't place him.

 
          
"Colin!"
Sally said, and the young man
—
obviously
her
young man, in the quaint old phrase
—
said quickly:

 
          
"I
didn't think you knew anyone in this part of the country, Sara."

 
          
"I
don't," Sally protested, and introductions were quickly made. The young
man was Brian Standish, the new GP, here helping out his cousin James with the
rigors of a rural practice.

 
          
With
a faint sense of inevitability, Colin heard the rest of Sally's news: the
tragic death of her younger brother that triggered her mother's death in turn,
the freak accident that claimed her father's life only a few days later.

 
          
As
if there were something winnowing away the unwanted ones, cutting Sally loose
from anything that might anchor her to sanity, reality. And then bringing her
here.

 
          
He
searched her face as she spoke, but could see no trace in those wide green eyes
of the ancient malignant soul of Witch-Sara, seven years dead and ripe for her
rebirth (so the cult believed) in the body of a family member. He'd never
really noticed before, not having seen her for some time, but Sally was the
exact image of the pictures of the Latimer witches that Miskatonic kept in the
closed stacks: red hair, pale skin, tilted green eyes, and even the small mole
at the right corner of her mouth. He listened with a sinking heart as Sally
innocently told him about her Great-Aunt Sara's legacy, the house on
Witch Hill Road
—
and about the Church of the
Antique Rite, to which, apparently, she'd already been introduced . . . and
invited.