Ghostlight (17 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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“I saw—” Truth began, and bit the words back. Tell Irene Avalon that she'd seen her father and she'd sound like a raving lunatic—or, worse, perfectly rational by Irene's skewed standards.
“Oh, well, pet, never you mind what you saw. It's my belief that sometimes the Guardians just forget how frail we poor time-bound mortals are—a warning from the likes of them is as like to lay you out flat as tell you something you need to know. It's just that way with all the Powers,” she added in a tone of faint reproach.
Truth had to smile at the image thus conjured, of Irene fiercely scolding one of the hieratic Egyptian figures from the Temple.
“There you are!” Irene said bracingly. “I'll just run you a nice hot bath; that, and a dose of my cordial hotted up will put you right as right!” Irene bustled off to the bathroom connected to Truth's room, and in a moment Truth could hear the water running.
“I'll just pop off and get you some of my special salts for the bath and hot water for your drink,” Irene said in no-nonsense tones. Truth nodded. It was easier than arguing. She was suddenly far too tired to fight.
When Irene left, Truth wandered into the bathroom—a period piece from the early fifties—and watched the steam billow up from the tub to mist the white-tile walls and the chrome fixtures. Everything was clean, white, and antiseptic, unchanging and perfect, just the way she'd always wanted her life to be, with nothing of uncertainty or doubt.
“I've brought you a—Where are you, dear? Oh,
there
you are.” Irene's voice heralded her arrival long before she appeared. “I've brought you a nice warm robe to wrap up in,” she announced, and then leaned past Truth to sprinkle crystals from a pottery jar into the foaming water beneath the tap. Instantly the water in the tub turned an intense blue-green, and a bracing scent of ocean and forest filled the air.
Truth inhaled, sneezed, and blinked. The scent warmed her spirit just as the steam warmed her body, and she felt better almost at once.
“What is this?” she asked Irene.
“One of my own recipes,” the older woman said. “And so is this.” She handed Truth a thick white mug full of a steaming scarlet liquid.
Truth took it and inhaled deeply. Strong sweet scents of oranges and flowers and honey assailed her nostrils.
“It's just my cordial mixed up with a little hot water. And as for that, there's nothing to it that can hurt you, just a bit of honey, herbs, and whiskey. You won't find a clergyman's daughter in the whole of England who won't swear by the virtue of a wee drop now and again.”
Truth smiled, faintly sipping at it as the tub filled. The hot cordial went down like fiery silk, smoothing and soothing whatever it touched.
When the tub was full and the cup was empty, Irene closed off the taps and took the mug from Truth's hands.
“Now a good soak and then to bed. You'll feel altogether better in the morning.”
“Thank you,” Truth said. Impulsively she hugged the older woman. “You're so kind,” she said.
There were tears in Irene's eyes as she answered, “Ah, child, it's no more than I owe to you—and to
him.
”
 
A leisurely soak in the herbal bath completed the restoration of Truth's equanimity. When she got out, wrapping herself in the thick, terry-cloth-lined flannel robe Irene had left her, she was tired, but ready to take a leisurely,
rational
look at matters as they now stood.
But she did lock her door, before reaching for her notebook and settling down to gather her thoughts.
A few minutes later she'd finished her notes covering the day's events, from Ellis's cryptic warnings at breakfast to Michael's cryptic warnings before dinner. The list of people who
hadn't
warned or threatened her at Shadow's Gate was growing shorter by the day, and in the end, the only person who'd probably still be on it was Light.
Truth felt deeply guilty about her behavior before Light earlier this evening, but Julian had said the girl
hadn't noticed, and from what Truth knew about trance psychism, it was very probably true. Still, tomorrow she would seek her out and apologize. Truth had a faint disturbing sense that here at Shadow's Gate she could afford no acts of pettiness or sins of discourtesy.
What a pity nobody's told Fiona the same thing
, Truth thought with an inward smile.
Before getting into bed Truth checked, once more, on the security of
Venus Afflicted
, and this time drew the book forth from its hiding place. Here, in the very house where it had probably been written, its odd archaisms seemed more accessible than they had before. Perhaps, with enough study, she could extract the underlying purpose to what seemed now more akin to a cross between a recipe book and a mad playwright's prompt copy.
Truth paged through
Venus Afflicted
, picking out this bit and that as if she were plundering the blooms of a hothouse garden. Greek titles and Latin invocations, Egyptian costumes and Norse gods; Blackburn had certainly constructed his cult with a fine free syncretic hand—and then had the nerve to wrap it all up in some kind of Celtic twilight and claim he sought the return of the Old Gods from
Tir na Og
, the Land of Youth, and that he himself was a son of the
sidhe
, the Fairy Race.
“Human—or almost,”
Ellis had said.
Breakfast seemed a thousand years ago, but his words returned suddenly to haunt her. If Blackburn were half-elven, what did that make
her?
Idiocy!
she snorted.
But two days ago the thought would not have made her so uneasy.
REVEALED TRUTH
It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak, and another to hear.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
 
 
 
THE FOLLOWING DAY—TRUTH'S THIRD AT SHADOW'S Gate, if she counted the day she'd arrived—was also clear, though less bright, but in October one accepted any good weather one got with gratitude.
As before, the house seemed almost asleep when Truth left her rooms. She would have liked to have found Light, perhaps even talked to her without one of the men around, but Light was nowhere to be seen. She'd have to make it a priority to find out where Light's room was, if she could do it without being obvious about it.
Rather than risk breakfast with Ellis or another run-in with either Fiona or Michael, Truth opted for breakfast in town, at the aluminum-sided diner on Main Street that she'd passed the day before. She took the car, both because she was not overfond of the thought of a two-mile walk before her morning coffee, and, she realized, because it would be harder for someone to stop her in the car.
But that's ridiculous!
a part of her mind insisted. The worry was perilously close to paranoia. No one was going to stop her.
Ridiculous? So is having visions of Thorne Blackburn.
Oddly enough, if Truth had been of a more mystic and dreamy-eyed temperament it would have been easier to dismiss the sight—and sound—of Thorne Blackburn as nothing more than the outliers of a stress-induced nerve storm. But Truth—at least so she had used to think—had nerves of steel, and did not begin concocting explanations for phenomena before she'd finished experiencing them. And she certainly didn't have to concede that Thorne Blackburn was a priest-king and magician to admit she'd seen him—not after yesterday's discovery that Shadow's Gate was in all probability haunted.
And she bet she knew just where the hidden spring was too.
Why else build that bizarre round room right out of a Richard Matheson story at the center of the house? The bricked-over spring must be directly beneath.
As before, her mood lightened and her thoughts cleared as soon as she left the estate, making it harder to take last night's events seriously. If that continued, Truth realized she'd have to consider very seriously whether she could, in fact, work at Shadow's Gate at all. The final decision on that could wait until she had more information, though, and the odd unsettled feelings might go away of their own accord.
She hoped. Because try as she might, she could not shake the conviction that she had unfinished business at Shadow's Gate.
Breakfast gave her the chance to make inquiries of some of the local residents, and after breakfast she drove into Hyde Park, to the offices of the Mid-Hudson Cellular Phone Company.
 
 
After breakfast she drove south until she found a mall, and looked around until she found a store that promised her a phone capable of immediate reliable communication, bell-like sound quality, and the ability to also access her e-mail from the depths of the Amazon rain-forest.
In Truth's opinion, cell phones were a waste of time, a way for people with too much free time to annoy others who were trying to get actual work done—or worse, attempting to get
away
from work. Their constant ringing on trains, in theaters, and in restaurants set her teeth on edge, and the conversations she couldn't help but overhear never seemed to be very important.
But she needed one now. And the salesman assured her that their wireless network would enable her to stay connected
anywhere.
Take that, Shadow's Gate.
 
Her new purchase tucked into her purse—it was as small and light as something out of science fiction—Truth headed back toward Shadowkill. When she arrived, she could use the phone to call Aunt Caroline, just to test it out. The list of questions she had kept getting longer.
Had
Blackburn known Shadow's Gate was haunted? Who was the baby in the photograph? How many children had the feckless Blackburn fathered—and where were they now? What did Aunt Caroline know about Julian Pilgrim, the new master of Shadow's Gate?
So many questions …
But when she arrived, and pulled into the parking lot of the Shadowkill Public Library to make her call, she found that the time to make that call had passed.
 
“I'm sorry, Ms. Jourdemayne.” Janine's voice was flat and robotic. “Mrs. Jourdemayne passed away early this morning.”
Truth clutched the little phone tightly to keep from dropping it. A claustrophobic weight settled over her—not
even guilt, but the suffocating sense of having made some fatal and irrecoverable error.
“Should I come there?” Truth asked numbly.
“There really isn't any reason for you to,” Janine admitted grudgingly. “She really had everything planned. The funeral home came and took the body this morning, and Mrs. Jourdemayne left a list of people to call with a friend of hers from the library; I'm just waiting for her to get here so I can hand over the keys. She had everything all planned,” Janine said, in something like awe. “There's nothing left to do.”
From a distance Truth heard herself mouth empty courtesies, and then at last the phone slipped from her nerveless fingers and clattered to the floor of her car.
 
She didn't remember getting out of the car. She walked aimlessly, taking no particular note of anything but the sidewalk beneath her feet. She didn't know how long she walked, but finally she stopped and, looking up, saw the graceful Gothic arch of a church door before her.
She looked at the sign out front. An Episcopal Church. She remembered Aunt Caroline taking her to Sunday School as a child, although she'd never been quite certain how much religion Aunt Caroline herself had possessed.
The door stood open. On an impulse, Truth went up the stairs and in.
The inside was quiet; dark after the sunlit street. There was a rose window behind the altar and high old-fashioned stained-glass windows on both sides of the church. It was peaceful; the polar opposite of the circular room at Shadow's Gate. As soon as her eyes adjusted, Truth found a pew and seated herself.
After a moment she began to twist uncomfortably in the seat. She'd meant to offer up some acknowledgment of Aunt Caroline's death; some formal response to her passing, but she couldn't. The wooden bench beneath
her seemed almost impossibly uncomfortable, and the uninhabited silence clamored in her ears.
What are you seeking wisdom in the temple of the dead god for, Daughter of Earth? You are none of his!
It was only hyperactive imagination that shaped the words echoing on her inner ear, but it was just the sort of mystic, grandiloquent pronouncement Thorne Blackburn would make.
Daughter of Earth. Child of the
sidhe …
Now, when it was far too late, Truth hated herself for every opportunity she had not taken, for every question she had not asked her aunt. Now her only source for information she could trust was gone forever—the woman who might have helped her build a bridge between what she was and what she had become—or was becoming.
Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself!
Truth scolded herself fiercely. She'd known Aunt Caroline was dying—she ought to be happy that the woman who had raised her had been spared the final indignity of impersonal hospitals and clinical care. Caroline Jourdemayne had died in her own bed, that was something to be happy for. Since her twin Katherine's death, Caroline's life had been a burden and a responsibility, not a joy, and now she was free.
Truth should be happy for her.
Then why was she so afraid … ?
With the faint sense of another escape route closing behind her, Truth rose and left the church.
 
“I've found another book for you,” Laurel Villanova said triumphantly.
It was just after one o'clock, and Truth had come back to the library to bury all her emotional turmoil in a search for the history of Shadow's Gate. Work had always been her escape, Truth realized, an escape so laudable that few people saw it for what it was: flight from a reality that held nothing but pain and a world in which she did not belong.
It had always worked before. It would work now. Gratefully she put away all the sadness of the day; she would solve the riddle of Shadow's Gate—and of Thorne Blackburn.
With a grateful smile, Truth took the dusty green-bound volume from Laurel and set it down on the table.
The River Where the Ghosts Walk: A Haunted History of the Hudson Valley,
said the title. Truth opened it, frowning. Blackburn had also owned a copy of this book—Truth had seen it in Julian's collection.
Copyright 1938. She flipped to the table of contents.
“There's a chapter on Shadow's Gate,” Laurel said helpfully. “I've marked it for you.”
Truth saw the colored paper marker and turned to the indicated chapter. Facing the first page was a bound-in photo on glossy stock of a rambling Federalist house, built long and low in the style of eighteenth-century Colonial architecture and lime washed to a flat white. Beneath the picture was the legend: “
Shadow's Gate, built 1780. 1869 photo.
”
She was looking at a picture of the third house.
 
Time fell away as Truth Jourdemayne did what she had been trained to do: search the facts and find the truth beyond. The books she had used the day before were still close to hand on the long table in the Local History Room, and Truth had the notes she had taken to help her as well.
Time passed, and slowly, cross-checked but with many question marks remaining, the story took shape.
In 1780, in the first years of the new Republic, a third building was erected—“and we shall call it Shadows-gate, after the style of Elkanah Scheidow who first settled here”—on the site of Scheidow's first trading post, which Truth now knew to have been situated beside the spring that was the source of the local
kill
, or stream. No wonder they'd called it Scheidow's
kill
, if he'd built his business right beside it.
The 1780 house, which was to vanish from the local historical records less than a century later, was built by one of the
patroons'
descendants. In the nearly century and a half since Elkanah Scheidow had first come to what was then a lush and forbidding wilderness, the family's fortunes had prospered. Each generation built upon the wealth of the last, and, through all the political shifts and upsets of fate, the Scheidow family had managed to hang on to a great deal of the land originally granted to it, and re-granted in turn by the British and the new American government. Land was wealth. The new house was to reflect this. Its windows came from Holland, its stone masons from New York City.
It was almost enough to compensate for the other widely-known fact about the Scheidow lineage.
A century and a half previously, Elkanah Scheidow had shrewdly expropriated one of the local Indian tribes' sacred places as the site of his business. Possibly his original intention had been only to build his trading post on neutral ground in order to minimize tribal feuding, but the effect had been to make himself an envoy of the
manitou
, the guardians of the Native American spirit world. With so much invisible authority supporting him, Elkanah's business had prospered—at a cost.
The
manitou,
if gossip of the period could be believed, were quite content with the interloper's presence—providing they were served as they had always been. As early as 1780 an odd aura of misfortune already hovered over what would someday be known as Shadow's Gate.
Truth pieced together from the genealogical records a tale of nagging, recurring misfortune: this child dead in infancy, that in childhood. So many of them drowned in the spring that had been the source of stream and town alike that in 1684 Scheidow's grandson, after the drowning death of his youngest brother, had it lined and capped as if it were a well and built a well house over the site—with a door to which he held the only key. He'd died
soon after, by means the sources available to Truth did not name, but it was so easy to think of him walking out from the house one night in the storm, unlocking the well house and passing within, opening the cover over the well and climbing down into it,
and pulling the cover back over the well from the inside.
Truth gave herself a mental shake, reminding herself that she didn't know and would never know how Tobias Scheidow had died. What she did know was that at the time of the building of the third house, the well had been incorporated into the building itself, and all trace of its location destroyed forever.
With the capping of the spring in 1684, the reports of drownings disappeared from the local records, but the other afflictions seemed far from diminished. And once in each generation, a member of the family simply—vanished.

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