Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (88 page)

 
          
"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 another 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.