Ghostlight (35 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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She had never felt so inadequate.
Now that she had the equipment she'd asked for, where was she going to put all of it? She should have thought of that long before.
The library was an obvious place, and one that had been the center of a previous event: It was reasonable for her to put one of the cameras and one of the polybarometers here to see what she caught.
But the obvious place for the other one, plus both cameras and the tape recorder, was her bedroom. Thorne had come there before—he would probably return there again.
And when he did, she could nail him.
But if she did that, she'd have to admit she was being haunted—and by whom. Sanctity of the scientific method or no, Truth was unwilling to expose herself to the attention she would receive from Julian's Circle of Truth if that particular truth came out. There must be some other way.
So she decided to put the other polybarometer in the Temple.
Julian poked his head in to see how she was doing
around three. He had no objection to the polybarometer going into the Temple, although he would not permit either the camera or the tape recorder there.
“Our rituals are secret, Truth. And even though one day I hope you will be inside the Veil rather than outside, photographing or taping what we do—no,” he said.
In the end—running out of both ideas and patience—Truth decided to set up the other two cameras to provide a parallax image in the library, and that gave her the perfect excuse to take the tape recorder upstairs with her. Let them think she only wanted to keep it out of the way. Maybe she could get proof without anyone knowing.
But what would she do with it when she had it?
 
By the time she'd wrestled the tape recorder upstairs it was after six, and while Truth had no idea by this time if any of the Institute's equipment would even work, she was pretty sure she hadn't broken any of it.
She glanced out through the windows. The sun had already set, leaving only a faint indigo line of light upon the horizon, but ornamental floodlights shone out over the garden and maze. After a day spent indoors, a walk in the fresh air seemed especially inviting.
Saint Martin's summer—that brief warm period after the first frost—was still ahead, and the evening air was cool and inviting on Truth's face as she walked out down the white pebble pathway. Glancing back over her shoulder, she could see that most of the rooms of the big old house were lit, including one high in the corner. Light's.
I wonder where she and Michael went today?
For a moment Truth let her mind run free to speculate upon the future. After everything here was over, she would take Light away with her. She had a two-bedroom apartment; it would be only a small inconvenience to move her office into her bedroom and give Light a room of her own. Light could wander the Taghkanic campus as easily as this, and Truth—
But there imagination foundered, because Truth could not see herself slipping comfortably back into her old life. And what if she took Julian up on last night's offer and went to Europe with him? What would happen to Light then?
We could take her with us
, Truth thought, even as she realized that Light was utterly unequipped to deal with the crowded chaos of European travel.
But it isn't going to matter
, Truth thought with a strange detachment.
That won't be my decision to make.
The fey impulse faded, and Truth saw that her footsteps had brought her to the maze. She hesitated at the entrance. Going in was tempting, and if they hadn't changed it from the map she'd seen in one of the books, she'd be fine.
And even if they had, how lost could she get in something this small? It wasn't as if she were daring Hampton Court Maze. Truth started down the path.
She'd just had time to get inside, for the high boxwood hedges to cut off the light and for her to realize how really foolhardy an idea it was to come in here after dark when … something …
changed.
If this had been California and not New York, Truth would not have hesitated to name it an earthquake; it had the same rolling disorienting quality that made its victim need to stop and remember his own name. She felt as though she'd tripped over a step that wasn't there, although the path was perfectly smooth.
Then she realized that something was burning—she smelled the smoke and heard the crackle of flames like far-off gunfire. She turned.
There was no hedge between her and the burning house. She started forward, and stopped as the realization came to her that something was wrong, that a fire like this could not have spread in the few minutes she'd been out of the house. Then she realized that the house that was burning was not the one she had left.
The burning house was a long low rambling white clapboard structure, its small windows set high under the eaves. It was filled with fire, and every window showed the hot gold of a jack-o'-lantern's eyes. Shadow's Gate—just as it had been the night it burned, as it had been in 1872, one hundred twenty-three years before.
As if she possessed the clairvoyance she tested in others, Truth stared into the fire and seemed to see
through
it—to see with snapshot clarity a whitewashed bedroom with a high-canopied tester nestled beneath its slanting ceiling. The fire was all around, but even the fire had not eradicated the lacy sprays of blood that patterned the walls of the room.
In the middle of the room stood a man, his skin baked glistening red by the flames and his shirt soaked with blood and sweat, holding an axe and sobbing as he plied it past all necessity. Bringing it down again and again, though its targets had long since ceased to struggle and, even, to breathe.
Elijah Cheddow. Who, on this site, had killed his family and vanished—burned to death in a fire he himself had set. And no one had ever known why, though Truth was beginning to suspect.
The flame-fed vision faded as a section of roof caved in, sending a pillar of sparks skyward. In the distance she could hear a bell tolling to waken the villagers of Shadowkill to the disaster in their midst.
But somehow, for all its horror, the scene Truth watched held no power to frighten—its emotional impact was as diminished as if it existed in the shadow of even greater terror, of power which—once bound—must be fed.
“I know a bank where the wild time grows,” a familiar voice said behind her. “No, don't turn around.”
She glanced sideways as Thorne spoke, and as she looked away from the fire felt it suddenly cease, tucked back into the past once more. The evening breeze rustled in the leaves of the boxwood hedge.
“Hello,” Truth said, and then, reluctantly: “Hello, Father.”
The fear she had not felt watching the fire came now—not of Thorne Blackburn, but for herself, her sanity. She understood now what Michael had been trying to tell her about leaving while there were things she didn't know—about leaving while she still had the serene certainty that there was only one way to see the world.
“Wouldn't you like to walk down the drive and get in your car and leave? You could send for your things—and if you don't get them, so what? You dress like a straight anyway,” Thorne added with faint scorn.
“Why should I leave?” Truth forced herself to ask.
Now that I'm finally beginning to find out who I really am.
She stared straight ahead at the hedge-wall of the maze. She could still see the entrance off to her right. There was no house burning there now.
Or should that be … yet?
“So you could always be certain about everything—including your sanity,” Thorne said in response. “You're not like the others—you're
my
daughter. And you don't even understand what that means,” he added.
Don't I? When blood calls to blood?
Truth turned around abruptly. There was no one there. She glanced up the path, although she knew that if someone had been standing there they had not had time to get out of sight.
She reached out her hand and brushed the leaves. There was no path through them.
“I'm already crazy,” Truth said aloud. “I've read about hallucinations—they aren't like this. Normal people don't see things that aren't there and have conversations with people that don't exist. And what about Light?”
There was no answer.
“Thorne!” Truth's voice was preemptory, demanding, the question of reality set aside. “What about Light?
What will happen to her if I go? She won't go with me. She's your daughter too—our blood—what will happen to her?”
I'm standing out here in the dark yelling at the bushes
, Truth realized suddenly.
“Thorne? Father?”
Oh please answer me.
“The Light and the Truth are the Way,” Thorne Blackburn said. Truth couldn't tell what direction the voice was coming from, though she could hear the smile in his voice that told her he was pleased with his own cleverness. “And the Way is the Way of the Pilgrim. Your blood has chosen for you, daughter. Beware.” The voice faded like a theatrical special effect.
“Oh Jesus Christ!” Truth snapped in nervous exasperation. Not another florid melodramatic cryptic warning! She thought of all the things she wanted to say to Thorne Blackburn at that moment and decided that none of them was suitable for addressing one's father, living or dead.
I'm going crazy. I'm having all the arguments with my father I would have had when I was a teenager, only I'm not a teenager and he's
dead.
But it doesn't seem to change anything … .
Truth retraced her steps quickly and went back into the house.
 
Wherever Michael had gone with Light that afternoon, they were both back at the house in the time for dinner. Fiona was also at the table, carefully not looking at Truth.
Julian presided over them like an antique god over his unruly children, coaxing, chiding, and proclaiming by turns. He reserved a special smile for Truth, and it warmed her as if she still stood before the fire that had burned tonight in the parlor fireplace. Only later did she realize it should have triggered an associative memory of her vision of the burning of the previous Shadow's
Gate, but it was as if those memories were in a class by themselves, untouched by mundane reality.
Conversation eddied around her, excited and anticipatory. The Circle would be working tonight, beginning the rituals that would culminate in the Opening of the Way. The Circle would meet every night from midnight until dawn right through a week from Monday—Halloween—for six hours of Blackburn's elaborate
théâtre sacré.
On Halloween night they would start at dusk, and work the final ritual of Thorne's liturgy—the one that would reconnect the worlds of Gods and Men.
And then what?
Though she'd been here only a few days, Truth had become fond of most of Julian's Circle: the aloof Donner; Hereward with his backhand mockery; Ellis, who seemed always to be consciously satirizing himself; Caradoc, whose involvement in something this outré appeared so out of character; Gareth who wanted so passionately to belong—and who was so unsuitably in love. They weren't just dry case histories in a monograph on cults—they were people heading for disaster as surely as if they'd been let loose in an armory to play with the guns.
Why was she so sure of that?
The question took on fresh urgency the longer she considered it. She was—she was having some sort of breakdown, because if she was not, what
was
happening to her?
And Thorne kept harping upon the fact that she was
his
daughter, as if that fact put her in a special class of danger—but what?
The longer Truth stayed at Shadow's Gate, the more questions—and fewer answers—she had.
 
The members of the Circle excused themselves directly after dinner; Truth gathered that there were a number of preparations that preceded the ritual. Julian hung back,
and, when she got to her feet, walked with Truth back into the parlor.
The lights were turned low, and the fire in the fireplace was burnt down to coals. The litter of glasses, abandoned from the predinner cocktails, was still present. Truth walked over to the fireplace, staring down into the dying fire. Who was Thorne Blackburn—and
what
was his daughter?
Julian came up and put his arm around her; his hand was warm where it cupped her shoulder. She could feel the thrum of power running through him, like the low purr of an idling engine.
“Your equipment should have recorded some interesting data by tomorrow,” Julian said.
“I hope so,” Truth said, but even the possibility of graphing the fluctuations in energy produced by the workings of an occult Lodge could not distract her from the feeling of doom that hung over her.

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