Ghostlight (19 page)

Read Ghostlight Online

Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
2.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
She slipped the book inside and folded the top flap of the purse over to conceal it. There. She'd just go down to the car and lock it in the trunk, and then come back up and find out just who the
hell
had possessed the brassbound gall to rummage through her possessions as though they were on a bargain-basement sale counter!
She swung the purse, newly heavy, up over her shoulder, and stopped. She might as well take the jewelry down too.
But when she went to look for it, it wasn't there.
Truth, anxious and angry and getting angrier by the moment, scrabbled through both of the top drawers of the dresser as roughly as any burglar. The ring and the necklace were gone.
Stolen.
Who?
The question made her laugh aloud, and the sound was edgy and overwrought. Who
wasn't
a suspect? Normally she'd just suspect Fiona Cabot, who didn't seem to have any too many scruples, but considering what was missing—ritual jewelry belonging to Thorne Blackburn and nothing else—anyone could be a suspect: Ellis the cynic, Michael the mystic, Julian—who pretended to a detachment he couldn't possibly have—Irene … .
I hate these people! I hate this place! All I want to do is leave!
a small voice inside Truth cried furiously. But it wasn't true any longer—if, indeed, it ever had been.
There was Light to think of. Light—who might even be her sister.
She hefted the bag higher on her shoulder and left her room.
 
Truth's only intention was to get out to the car, stash the book, and nip back in before anyone was any the wiser—unless, of course, she just got in and drove like hell. It might, in fact, be the most sensible thing to do—she could call Julian later and tell him Aunt Caroline had died; that would be reason enough for anyone …
Leave now and the others take what is yours.
Unfortunately for her plan she got turned around at the foot of the stairs and found herself passing the door of the room that held the Blackburn collection, a path that took her in the opposite direction from the front door which was her goal.
The door to the room was open.
Truth put her hand on the knob, intending only to close the door, and recoiled with a convulsive jerk. The handle was ice cold—as cold as if it were buried in a snowbank in deep winter. Even from so brief a contact, her fingers were tingling and numb.
Unnaturally cold …
Cautiously, Truth pushed the door open wider. It was dark inside, the high windows flanking the fireplace casting back the twilight afterglow. There was a fire in the fireplace too, the merest line of orange coals.
Automatically, not thinking it would really work, Truth flicked on the light switch. She felt a leap of pure scientific triumph as the fixtures overhead lit normally, then sank back to a fraction of their normal brightness, as if the power allocated for their illumination was being diverted to another purpose by some unknown agency.
Then she saw Light.
The girl was wearing the white robe Truth had seen her in the night before. She was curled in a fetal ball before the dying coals of the hearth, her hair spilling out around her like a silver spider-silk shroud. Truth couldn't tell whether or not she was breathing. If the room were as cold as the doorknob seemed to indicate, Light could not survive in there much longer.
Truth did not hesitate. Her purse over her shoulder, she took a step into the room. In the moment she crossed the threshold the bitter cold struck her to the bone. She'd been right. Getting Light out of here was vital.
She glanced up at the painting over the fireplace. Something was different about it, and after a moment she realized what it was. The painted figure of Thorne Blackburn was wearing his amber necklace and signet ring.
Oh. How very interesting,
she thought with a numb detachment. She did not have time to marvel at irrelevant ghostly sendings now or to wonder what such omens meant. Only the length of the dimly-lit room separated her from Light, but to cross it was an effort equivalent to scaling the outside of a building under her own power.
As she moved forward, the wide-planked floor seemed to tilt and shift under Truth's feet, as if it were a part of some demented fun-house entertainment. Around her the room seemed to warp and shimmer as if viewed
through water. She could no longer see Light, and could only pray she was going in the right direction.
Was this what Elijah Cheddow had seen, the night he tried to end the curse of Shadow's Gate by destroying his entire family?
The cold was more bitter than that of any winter she had ever known, weakening her as if she were bleeding from an open wound. As Truth forced her way farther into the room, it occurred to her for the first time that the rescue she had undertaken so rashly might not be possible, that she and Light might both die here—slain by the unreal.
It seemed horribly absurd to be fighting for her life against the nebulous paranormal here while scant rooms away there were people talking and laughing and thinking about their dinners—and living … .
Time lost all meaning, as in the farthest reaches of delirium. For some reason, after a while it seemed better to crawl, and so Truth was on her hands and knees when she reached Light.
The girl's body seemed cramped and lifeless, her white flesh hard and cold, but Truth, grimly determined, wound her numb and frozen hands in the girl's robe and pulled. Light's body shifted and began to slide in the direction of the pull. Truth stopped once to use the table to haul herself erect, then resumed her bleak burden.
Her blood was a sick thunder in her head, and the oxy-genless air gave her no life. To stop was to die, but Truth knew she did not have the resources within her to go on. But no matter how close she was to death, she did not even consider abandoning Light.
Suddenly strong arms—arms from the First World, the world of life—circled her waist lending her strength as they dragged her backward. For one desperate eternal moment Truth thought that even this would not be enough to prevail against the force sucking her down into that room, but then the balance of power shifted, and they
were free. Truth staggered backward over the threshold, Light's chill frailness a slack weight in her arms.
The cold ceased instantly.
“Julian!” Truth gasped, seeing their rescuer at last. “Oh my God—”
Julian's normal equanimity had been sorely tried. His handsome features were drawn and there was an expression almost of fear beneath a rigidly imposed calm.
“What—?” he said, looking about as if dazed. Then he knelt beside Light, taking her icy fingers in his hands, and his whole manner changed. He cradled the unconscious girl against his chest and then seemed to realize that would not help.
“Are you all right, Truth?” he asked, looking up at her. “We have to get her warm—she's freezing.”
Truth nodded, shakily. She was shuddering with the cold, her teeth chattering with chill and reaction, but Light's more immediate danger outweighed her own.
Julian stood, lifting Light in his arms, and headed for the stairs. Truth staggered along behind him, glancing back as she did so.
In the Blackburn Library, the lights burned brightly and the flames of a roaring fire leapt in the fireplace. Above the mantelpiece, the painted figure in the gaudy painting wore neither necklace nor ring.
 
She followed Julian upstairs with Light, her muscles aching with returning warmth. The girl's room was two floors above Truth's, in what had once been servants' rooms. The only thing above this should be the front and back attics and the four tower rooms, which, although Truth had seen lights in them indicating their occupancy, she did not know how they could be reached.
The door that she opened at Julian's behest led into a small cozy room with a slanting ceiling. Curtains of crisp white lace hung at the window; as Truth drew them shut, she could see the many angles of the roof of Shadow's
Gate and a bit of the central cupola below. She turned back as Julian was laying Light down upon the bed. He began to undress her with the clinical impersonality of a doctor.
“Her nightshirts are in the dresser. Get one out for me, will you?”
She found them without difficulty. Julian held out his hand for the gown as Truth returned, but Truth clutched it to her, staring at Light's frail, oddly immature body.
Thin white scars criss-crossed her back and thighs, and here and there was the deep violet crater of a cigarette burn.
Julian yanked the gown from Truth's hands. “What are you staring at? I told you she'd been in an institution,” he said roughly. With deft gentleness, he worked the gown over Light's slender form. The girl's eyes remained closed, and she gave no sign of consciousness.
“She's been
tortured
!” Truth said, outraged.
“Always considered a compelling form of argument by those who feel that others should see the world they way they do,” Julian said, with tired viciousness. “Did you think
I'd
tortured her? Light the flame under the chafing dish—I want to heat her some brandy,” he added matter-of-factly.
Julian covered Light tenderly as Truth found the chafing dish with its tea-light and a large box of wooden matches sitting on top of a low wooden cabinet. She scratched one alight, touching it to the charred wick of the small candle and then holding her hands out to the warmth. She was feeling better now, though she wondered if she'd ever really feel warm again, and Light had been in that room far longer than Truth had.
“Julian, don't you think we should get her a doctor? I mean—”
Julian rounded on her, gentling his expression with an effort. “Telling him what? That she nearly froze to death in front of a roaring fire in a closed room in October?
Even if I could come up with a suitable lie, Light is terrified of strangers. I won't subject her to that.”
He came over to the cabinet and opened its doors. Truth was surprised to see that it was filled with a variety of sweet snacks, from dried fruit and trail mix to candies made of crystallized honey and maple sugar, as if it were some naughty child's hidden store of goodies.
Some of its contents, however, were far from childish. Julian took out a bottle of brandy from the trove, and the package of crystallized honey.
“You give sugar for shock, and all forms of psychic power constitute some kind of shock to the system,” he explained, “a drain on the vital energies that must be replenished.” He poured a white china mug half full of brandy and set it over the flame Truth had lit, then added chunks of what Truth could only describe as dried honey until the cup was full. “Alcohol is one of the quickest ways of shutting down the
chakras
, the centers of psychic power that lie within the human body along the spinal cord. It's easy to misuse it, which is why so many of our people start out as Adepts and end up as alcoholics.”
“Like Ellis?” Truth asked. She sat down on a stool beside Light's bed and reached beneath the heated down comforter to clasp one of Light's chill hands in her own warmer ones.
“If you like. The Abyss is the greatest challenge to the development of any magician. Most of them fail the test in one way or another—like Ellis. Who knows what would have happened to Thorne?” Julian said absently, stirring the gaggingly-sweet concoction with a teaspoon. “A few minutes more,” he said, peering at it.
Truth gazed anxiously down at Light's still face. She was breathing normally, if shallowly, but her face was so still, so pale …
The memory of what they had both experienced in the library returned, and on the heels of thought came Truth's
instinctive denial. Thorne's picture had not changed.
You imagined it.
Although why she should be willing to admit the cold, the disorientation, the darkness had all been objectively real and only the hallucination of the change in the painted image purely her own invention made no sense. Was she afraid that something of Thorne Blackburn survived at Shadow's Gate after all these years—survived, and moved, and acted?
“Julian, we have to talk.”
“Agreed. Ah, I think it's warm enough. Lift her up, will you?”
“Shadow's Gate is haunted,” Truth went on doggedly, doing as he'd requested.
She winced at the coldness of Light's skin, chill even through the flannel, and wished there was some way to warm her more quickly. But she wasn't even sure of what had happened, let alone how to treat it.
“Shadow's Gate,” Julian said firmly, “is a nexus for the powers raised by the Blackburn Work, which we are engaged in performing here.” He spoke in the didactic tones suitable to soothing the fears of a small child. With cup in one hand and spoon in the other, he approached the bed.
“It was a focus for paranormal activity long before Thorne Blackburn was ever born—he bought it for its reputation as a haunted house!” Truth argued.

Other books

Johnny Long Legs by Matt Christopher
The Lost Boy by Pelzer, Dave
Don't Vote for Me by Krista Van Dolzer
Grand Canary by A. J. Cronin
Love Comes Home by Terri Reed
The Kings' Mistresses by Elizabeth Goldsmith
Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler
Fargoer by Hannila, Petteri