Ghostlight (24 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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Michael smiled bitterly. “If I explain myself so well that you understand and accept the truth of my words, I have failed, for you will already have learned the truth that I wish to spare you the learning of. As long as there is hope that you may remain innocent I must remain silent—for your sake.”
Look, are you really a member of the Inquisition? Or just the IRS?
The flippant words Truth wanted to utter shaped themselves in her mind and she let them die unsaid. Michael was earnest enough to be frightening—Truth believed that
he
believed what he said, and since last night
she was honest enough to admit that such belief didn't automatically mean the man was crazy.
Impulsively, she reached out, placing her hand over his.
“I'm sorry, Michael. I know you mean what you say. It's probably even true. But I just can't leave. I can't.”
Reaching inward, Truth was mildly surprised to find she spoke the literal truth. If she left now for whatever reason, some essential piece of the mechanism that made her Truth Jourdemayne and not some other woman would be broken forever.
Michael's hand closed over her own, offering a sanctuary that Truth knew she could not accept and remain who she was. She had a sudden vision of herself as a moth, withering in the ruthless flame of Michael's holy cleansing fire.
“I will pray for you, and hope that you find the strength to go,” Michael said.
“And I guess you and I will have a long chat on November first,” Truth said, striving for lightness. Every instinct screamed to her to run from Michael—not from what he would do, but simply from what he was. She forced herself to stay where she was, holding his hand.
Child of Earth, this is not your place … .
Michael smiled at her, with the painful gentleness of a man once more shouldering a burden too great for him, which nonetheless he must carry until the end.
“I am sorry,” he said regretfully, drawing his hand away and getting to his feet, and for that moment Truth could feel his sorrow like the tolling of a great bell.
Then Michael left the room, leaving Truth alone.
The morning sun glittered off the crystal drops of the unlit chandeliers, making even their brightness dull. The friendly room with its gracious Victorian furniture, brocade wallpaper, and matching velvet curtains looked as alien as if it had been assembled by Martians for some strange extraterrestrial rite. Truth stretched out the hand
that Michael had held and gazed at it as if she'd never seen it before.
Who should she be and what should she do, when all the beliefs she had always held about the nature of reality had taken such a mortal wound? What if these people weren't crazy? What if their way of seeing the world, not hers, was right?
What if the father she had hated all these years was not a monster, but a hero?
The pain of the upwelling tears was like acid, driving her to her feet. “No,” she whispered. “They're wrong. It's nothing but a stupid game. I'll prove it. I
will.
”
The room housing the Blackburn collection was quiet and austerely calm in the morning sun, like a temple erected to the serenity of pure thought.
Lies
, Truth reminded herself forlornly, with a distant foreknowing that the battle she was fighting she must inevitably lose.
Just as she seemed to be losing her mind. Because if she could not have seen and heard the things she
had
seen and heard, what was left for her to believe in?
The room held a faint scent of lemon polish, and she saw that the hearth had been swept clean of all the remaining ashes. She wondered who had done the cleaning—in fact, who did any of the cleaning at Shadow's Gate. Surely it wasn't Irene, despite the fact that Truth had seen her obviously on the way to make up Light's bed this morning. Irene could not do all the work around Shadow's Gate by herself, though Truth realized that she had seen no servants other than Hoskins the cook and Davies his assistant. So if not Irene, and not Hoskins, who?
But small domestic puzzles of this sort really weren't her concern, were they? She looked at the fireplace again. She must remember to ask Julian what had been burned there, although she'd already had one answer from Light—or from what spoke through her.
If she was willing to believe in it.
And if she were …
No. With an effort almost physical, Truth pushed unreason from her, and gathered in all the armor of logic that had protected her all her life. There was a haunting here, nothing more. She walked toward the fireplace, and as she did, Truth felt a sudden twinge of cold, as if she stood in a draft.
But there had been no draft here before. What there had been, as of last night, was a major Paranormal Event, and for such a thing to be able to occur here, there must be some sort of focus—some place in the room where the activity centered … and such places were almost always marked by a cold spot.
Such as this might be.
How to test it? Even the possibility of proper equipment was hours in the future—assuming she could reach Dylan and gain his aid. But she needed answers
now
!
Truth glanced around the room and saw a litter of office supplies abandoned casually atop one of the lower bookcases. Among them was a spool of thin twine and a piece of blackboard chalk.
Those would do.
A butterfly clip made a workable counterweight to a makeshift pendulum. Truth cut a length of twine the length of her body less eight inches—long enough so that when she held it straight out at arm's length, the metal clip weighting the end would hang just an inch from the floor. In less than five minutes, her preparations were complete.
She stood at the edge of the place where she'd felt the draft and held her arm straight out from the shoulder, the pendulum hanging straight down. Dylan had said that the best pendulums were copper, for some reason having to do with electricity; Truth only hoped a steel paper clip was an acceptable substitute. She'd read his paper on the mapping of cold-spot phenomena that had described what she was about to do, but she'd never actually seen the procedure demonstrated.
She'd been afraid to. It was clear now. Parapsychology was fine when it was a thing measured by computers and laboratories, but confronting the wild science on its own turf was something she'd shied away from, afraid of what she'd see.
There was so much she'd locked herself away from, afraid to look at it clearly. So much opportunity lost. And now Michael wanted her to go on hiding—didn't he see that it would be like asking her to bury herself alive?
Gritting her teeth, Truth stood fast, gazing downward and waiting for the motion of the pendulum to subside. It circled lazily, swinging back and forth, going slower and slower as it settled.
But when it stopped, it did not hang true.
Truth blinked her eyes, trying not to disturb the pendulum's stillness. It was hard to believe her eyes, even though she saw exactly what Dylan's research had prepared her to see: the pendulum cord hanging from her fingers at an angle, the pendulum at its end pulling it out of true, as though some invisible magnet called to it.
Truth marked by eye the place her pendulum strained toward. When she moved, it swung into motion again, hanging properly as though its unnatural suspension had only been a trick of the light. She made a mark on the floor with her chalk and moved a few steps to the side, holding her pendulum out once more at arm's length. She felt the cramp begin in her shoulders as she forced herself to hold the pendulum steady, waiting for it to slowly swing to a halt.
Half an hour later Truth had an aching neck and shoulders, and chalk marks edging an irregular oval about a yard in diameter on its long axis. Inside this invisible perimeter, the temperature was at least fifteen degrees colder than anywhere else in the room.
Gotcha!
Truth crowed silently. Once she'd set up the polybarometer to measure fluctuations here, it would be
as if she held a stethoscope to the heartbeat of the house. Peaks and valleys in event activity would be echoed in the fluctuations of temperature and pressure here.
Truth frowned. That was all very well if true. But she was nine-tenths certain that the
spring
was the center of the activity—and the spring was under Julian's Temple, not here.
Wasn't it? Truth sighed, winding the line into a little coil around the pendulum.
And stopped.
She was being watched.
The knowledge came with the suddenness of a revelation, all the more shocking for the fact that she was facing the tall oak double doors that opened into the room and knew they had not opened.
She was alone in this room.
But the sensation of being watched was so intense that it was nearly pain, and Truth surrendered to it, dropping her careful coil and sending the pendulum spinning to whip around her as she pivoted to stare at the wall behind her.
The walls in the library had the usual ornamental molding common to houses of this age, but now there was a long dark crack running down the outside edge of the molding, ruler-straight as it crossed the wainscoting to disappear into the cracks of the floorboards.
A door.
She'd taken two steps toward it before she realized that whoever had made this hidden doorway visible might even now be standing behind it—and she did not, suddenly, trust whoever that might be to harbor only benign intentions. Truth hesitated, caught between curiosity and common sense.
There was a high ringing whine, of the sort produced by rubbing a wet fingertip around the edge of a crystal goblet. Then a thump, heavy and wooden, like an axe sinking deep into a log.
Truth spun back the way she'd come, to see the immense, gilt-framed painting of Thorne Blackburn, six feet high by four feet wide, slam edge-down on the carved white marble mantelpiece, shattering the bottom edge of the ornate plaster frame. She had just time to jump back, hearing the tiny flecks of broken plaster strike the floor with a pattering sound like hail, as the enormous image tipped majestically forward, slamming facedown into the place that Truth had just been standing. Its impact made a booming crash like the thunderbolt of Judgment Day.
Truth gulped. The top edge of the frame was less than a foot from her feet. If she hadn't started over to the hidden door, she'd be under the picture now.
The door.
She turned back toward it, and saw no line in the wall. Forcing her trembling legs to obey her, Truth walked over to the wall and ran her hand down it, searching for a sign of the door that must be here.
There was no door, no join, no possibility of a door. The paint was a smooth unbroken surface, impossible to fake. There could not possibly be a door here.
It might have been a hallucination—another parapsychological event
, Truth suggested hopefully, and felt a familiar anger at having to do what amounted to taking a wild guess. She simply didn't know—there was no way to tell what the rules were any more.
She turned back to the wreckage that she could so easily have been a part of. Smashed plaster from the ornate gilt frame made a white starburst pattern against the yellow pine floor. Now that it was lying face down, it was easy to see that the portrait of Blackburn had been painted not on canvas, but on a slab of wood. Painting and frame together must easily weigh two hundred pounds. Truth felt a sick chill crawl up her spine. It could have meant a concussion, broken bones, or—worse. She groped toward one of the chairs and clutched at the back for support as she lowered herself into it.
Now that the immediate threat was over, reaction began in earnest, making her muscles dance and tremble as if they answered to another's will. Fighting off the sick chill that threatened to engulf her, Truth forced herself to focus on what had just happened. The picture had fallen.
Why? She no longer believed in coincidence.
Truth heard the sound of the door opening.
“Ah, hum,” Caradoc said, standing in the doorway. “I, uh—” He looked from the fallen picture to where Truth sat. “Need any help?”
TRUTH OR DARE
There is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.
—JONATHAN SWIFT
 
 
 
TRUTH LAUGHED HELPLESSLY, LOOKING FROM THE picture to Caradoc's face. “Despite what it looks like, iconoclasm is not among my vices. It just fell down.”
Didn't it?
Caradoc came toward her. The light turned his dark brown hair red where it struck it, giving his modishly short hair a faint, fiery halo. He stood beside her, staring somberly at the floor.
“Somebody,” Caradoc said after long consideration, “is going to have to pick it up and get it back on the wall. Julian's going to be pissed.”
He made this pronouncement with gloomy relish.
“The panel doesn't seem to be cracked, so the painting should be okay,” Truth said as consolingly as she could manage, “but I think the frame's a dead loss.” Caradoc snorted eloquently.
She looked up at the wall again. High up on its pale eggshell-cream surface, there was a small shining circle
flush with the wall, like a bullet hole with the bullet still in it—the back half of the bolt that had held the picture hanger. She looked down and saw the rest of it. The front half of the sheared bolt was lying in the plaster dust almost at her feet. It was as thick as her finger and looked as though something had sliced through it.
“What a mess,” Caradoc said again, bringing her attention back to him. “You're just lucky you weren't under it. I was going down to breakfast and I heard it fall—at least that's what I think I heard; it sounded like the crack of doom. I thought it was thunder, at first.”
Involuntarily Truth glanced toward the window. The clear blue sky showed no evidence of storms to come.
“Oh, sure,” Caradoc said as if she had spoken, “but we're going to have another tree-bender by tonight—you watch.”
He hesitated, like one who was willing to stay but was not sure if his presence were welcome. Truth wondered how she must have first appeared to the inhabitants of Shadow's Gate to make him behave that way. Now more than ever, she could not afford to be isolated, set apart. In the battle to come, she would need allies, and she had waited far too long to find them.
She thrust the alien intimation aside, unwilling to let it distract her.
“Caradoc,” Truth said, determined to find them some mutual ground and answer her own questions as well. “Has anybody ever mentioned secret passages here at Shadow's Gate? In the walls, or something like that?”
Caradoc frowned. “There's supposed to be one under the kitchen leading out to the barn—where a barn used to be, I mean, about a hundred years ago. But I think it was closed off from this end to keep the kitchen floor from falling in—back when Blackburn had the place, Julian said. And I know there're secret staircases in the third-floor bedrooms leading up to the towers. Julian
showed them to me on the plans.” Caradoc regarded her quizzically.
“But not in here?” Truth said.
“None at all on the ground floor, leaving out the kitchen. There wouldn't be room for them, would there, with the Drum Room and the hallways around it?”
“The drum room?” Truth asked.
“The Temple. Some of us call it the Drum Room. It's round, you see, and when you're in there during a storm it's like being inside a drum—everything echoes.”
“Hm.” Feeling her legs were steady enough now, Truth got to her feet. She stirred the scattered plaster on the floor with the toe of her shoe and bent over to pick up the bolt. She turned it in her fingers, looking at the mirror-smooth surface of the cut. The bolt holding the picture to the wall had sheared clean through, without the jagged twisted edges of normal metal fatigue.
But if it had been cut, wouldn't it have fallen the instant it had been cut, instead of waiting until she was standing beneath it? And it
could not
have been cut the instant before it fell, unless Shadow's Gate was haunted by gremlins carrying CO
2
lasers.
She tried another subject.
“Look, Caradoc, what do you think of Julian moving the Opening of the Gate like that?”
And what do you think of it, Truth Jourdemayne?
Truth wondered, hearing herself speak.
Caradoc shrugged. “Maybe it will work out the way he wants. Although, you know, with magick, we could succeed and not know it for weeks. That's how magick is.”
If you succeed, you'll know it in seconds.
Truth could not say where that inner certainty came from, nor the despairing conviction that Caradoc had little understanding of the real perils of the Great Work on which he was embarked. His magick was a magick of allegory and gnosis, not sheer eldritch power.
“Magick is really about personal transformation, you know, not all that David Copperfield stuff,” Caradoc went on. “I believe in what Blackburn was trying to do, and I can't think of a better time for the Gate Between The Worlds to be opened than now. The human race could really use some help, you know?”
Truth glanced up from the metal in her hands to Caradoc's face. His hazel eyes were alight with conviction—as if he had seen the problem of all the world's pain and seen, too, that there was something he could do to set his weight in the balance against it, a willingness that amounted almost to reckless gallantry, holding its own comfort irrelevant so long as mercy might be served.
Truth found the thought of such a passionate idealism profoundly disturbing.
“What do you think will happen if the Gate Between The Worlds is opened?” she asked, turning from the general to the specific. And besides, Truth was honestly curious to see what he would say. She needed to know more than her own opinions of the end result of the Blackburn Work if she was to go any further with this.
“Well, according to Blackburn himself, the realms of the Gods and men were separated by the will of the Gods in prehistoric times. The memory of the separation survived as the myth of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, but in reality it's the Gods who went away, not the humans who were driven out,” Caradoc began, with the air of one giving a familiar lecture.
Truth waited expectantly.
“Well,” Caradoc said. “Communication was always possible between the realms—that's what magick is all about—and of course the Gods could intercede in the human world at will, but once the Gate Between The Worlds had been closed humans could no longer move freely into the world of the Gods.”
“And Thorne Blackburn was going to change all that?” Truth asked. It seemed a rather ambitious undertaking
for someone who hadn't even been thirty when he died.
“The
Work
would change all that,” Caradoc corrected her gently. “Blackburn felt that the Ritual of the Opening of the Way—it's two weeks of rituals, really, but everyone who talks about it talks as if the last one is all there is to it—would begin the chain reaction that would merge the realm of the Gods with the realm of Men again. And we could finally ask them why they left us.”
Behind his quiet words Truth heard the crying of every abandoned child:
Why did you leave me, Daddy? Mommy? Don't leave me, don't
go—
“And the Gods would permit the reopening of this Gate?” Truth asked, voice level. She had her own reservations about Caradoc's belief that the Gods—if Gods there were—would simply let human beings knock down the wall They'd raised.
“Blackburn's philosophy held that anything Man was capable of doing, Man had a right to do; that the mind of Man should not be subject to the will of either Church or State. Of course, it isn't meant to excuse things like theft and mass murder,” Caradoc added, an apologia Truth had the impression he made fairly often.
“Understood,” Truth said briefly, although what she understood was that Thorne Blackburn's philosophy had excused a career of irreverence and license, self-indulgence and sheer folly, all in the name of Service to Higher Truth. Even putting the most charitable interpretation possible on Thorne's aims, humankind just wasn't meant to survive adherence to such a rarefied moral code. She wanted to say something more, perhaps even to explain. But she couldn't find the words, and the moment passed.
“I guess I'll go see if Julian's up—tell him about the picture,” Caradoc said reluctantly.
“He isn't here. He went driving with Light, Michael said,” Truth remembered.
She was relieved to see that Caradoc seemed to take this at face value. “He does that a lot. It seems to help. Poor kid. It'll be better for her once we open the Gate.”
“How?” Truth couldn't help but ask.
Caradoc stared at Truth with faint impatience. “Once the Gate is open and the Gods return, Light won't be a freak any more. She'll be
normal
,” he finally said.
“‘Your young men will dream dreams, and your old men will see visions.' Isaiah, isn't it?” Truth said.
“Something like that,” Caradoc said, suddenly subdued. “Anyway, I'll catch Julian when he comes back. Want some breakfast?”
“No,” Truth said, considering. “I've got some things to do. But thanks.”
Caradoc left her then, and once more Truth had the haunting sense of a challenge met—or a test passed.
 
“Your young men will dream dreams, and your old men will see visions,”
Truth quoted to herself. But when the Biblical prophet Isaiah spoke those words, he had been speaking of the Eschaton—the end of time. The last days. Ragnarok. Armageddon. He could not have known what future centuries would make of his words.
But was Thorne Blackburn's interpretation that far from the prophet's? Didn't he mean the Opening of the Way as the beginning of the end?
If that were so, then what Julian intended to do was not some joyous ritual of enlightenment, but something darker.
Much darker.
 
True to what Julian had told her—if not to the lavish promises of the cell phone company—Truth's newly purchased phone did
not
work the first time she tried it within the walls of Shadow's Gate. It sat in her hand, silvery and dead, and Truth found herself taking the mile walk down to Shadowkill and its theoretically
functioning and available telephones. At least the errand gave her the opportunity to move the necklace and ring from their concealment in her drawer to the safer sanctuary of the trunk of her car, allowing her to retrieve her purse as she did so.
It was all like some mad treasure-hunt-in-reverse; and Truth wondered despairingly how much longer she could keep one jump ahead of the unknown scavengers determined to pillage her treasures. Certainly these frequent trips to her car—when all her luggage was already inside—would make even the most trusting soul suspicious.
Alert this time to Shadow's Gate's uncanny influence, Truth had observed herself as best she could as she walked down the road to the gate. If she could trust her senses, Shadow's Gate exerted a perceptible influence on the emotions—or the imagination. Away from the site's influence, she discovered a strong urge to dismiss everything that happened there. Passing through the wrought-iron gates at the foot of the drive was like taking two Valium and a shot of scotch. No wonder she kept going back there, like the self-destructive heroine of a Gothic novel, if everything that happened there lost its emotional resonance once she left the property.
Intrigued, she tested it, something easier to do on foot than in a car. The boundary was not sharp-cut, and Truth suspected that it moved, but it was there. She wondered why none of the others had mentioned it. Maybe they didn't leave the property often enough—but Gareth spent at least part of each day in the gatehouse. Surely they'd noticed what Shadow's Gate was doing to them.
Unless it wasn't doing it to them, but only to her—Thorne Blackburn's daughter.
Grudgingly, she admitted that it was at least possible that the Shadow's Gate event was targeting her. At the very least, there had been an upswing in the number of Paranormal Events since she had arrived.
But targeting her how? Truth wondered, once she had safely arrived in the town. At Shadow's Gate she was on an abnormal emotional rollercoaster, true—but wasn't that a reasonable reaction to the emotionally fraught investigation of her past? And if it was, didn't that make her calmness here and now abnormal?
Once that would have been an easy judgment—surely this was her normal state, and the hysterical fantasies she experienced at Shadow's Gate the illusion.
But Light
had
been hurt. The picture
had
fallen. Let anything else you like be dream or vision, Truth told herself, those things were real—just as real as the cold spot on the library floor. Something was going on in the house that had once belonged to Thorne Blackburn. And like the heroine in the Gothic novel—but for much better reasons—Truth would go back to Shadow's Gate again, and force the house to give up its secrets.

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