Ghostlight (41 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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“No. Because you'll be there tomorrow, won't you? On the altar? You'll be my Hierolator, and together we will open the Gate Between The Worlds.”
“No!”
Her refusal was abrupt and instinctive. “You have Fiona,” she added, trying to soften her words.
“That thieving slut,” Pilgrim's voice was flat and
deadly. “You can
not
imagine what rutting with her has been like. She can't give me what I need. You can.”
“No, Pilgrim,” Truth said. “I can't do that for you.”
I've got to leave now.
She could wonder later if Pilgrim had always been mad or if Shadow's Gate had driven him crazy. Now she had to get out of here—she could call the police from Shadowkill; they'd believe her.
“You mean you
won't
!” Pilgrim shouted, suddenly furious. He moved quickly, and abruptly he was between Truth and the door. There was an ornate key in the old-fashioned lock, and Pilgrim turned it. He put the key in his pocket.
“You!” he snarled. “Leading your
soft
life with your loving aunt to make everything
nice
for you—while I was punished—punished for being
his
son, by all the petty-minded little moralists who tried to remold me in
their
image! Do you have any idea what a child without parents goes through in this society? The foster-care system if he is lucky—institutions if he is not—and any one of those so-loving caretakers more suitable to a brothel in Hell than to anyplace upon this Earth!
“Shall I fill your ears with horror, sister dear? Shall I show you my scars the way I showed you Light's? Will that incline you to me? You have
no idea
what I've suffered to reach this place—and now I ask you for
one little thing
and
you won't do it
!”
He was raving now, shrieking, but no one would hear through the thick walls of Shadow's Gate.
Oh, Daddy, you were right. Please help me … .
“I—” Truth began, but the lie dried in her throat.
Pilgrim laughed softly, his mood undergoing another one of those jarring unsane shifts. “Oh, don't worry, little sister. I've dealt with rebellion before. I am, you might say, an expert in the field.
“Take Ellis, for example. Ellis, you see, found out who I am—and that raises so many awkward questions.
How did a poor orphan boy get his hands on all those millions—and at such a youthful age? Well, never mind; it's a long story and boring in spots. But he was going to tell you—which is why he took his little unscheduled flight. I
don't
think he'll be coming back to us, either—insulin is usually fatal to nondiabetics, and poor Ellis was so badly hurt … .
“Michael, of course, knew all along,” Pilgrim continued, while Truth watched him with the frozen terrified fascination of a bird watching a cobra.
“I thought he'd want money, but no—and after all, what could he prove? Being Thorne's son isn't a crime, is it?” Pilgrim circled around again, until he reached his original position, and leaned against the arm of the couch. He smiled at Truth; and his eyes were alive with a malicious knowledge of her fear.
“I thought pretty Michael would have to go, though it would have been
very
inconvenient for me just at that moment, but all he wanted to do was live here. Our Michael, you see, preaches repentance, and he thought he could convince me to—not do what I intended. I let him try, of course, until I found out … Well, I won't tax your credulity; suffice it to say that the Archangel Michael has had—
car
trouble, and I don't think we'll see him again.” Pilgrim smiled; a smile of sharp, white teeth.
“Pilgrim, please open the door.” It took every ounce of control Truth possessed, but she kept her voice even and steady; free from the sick fear she felt. This reality was far more terrifying than any ghost—the reality of a madman who had killed and would kill again.
“Soon,” Pilgrim said, almost crooning now. “I promise. I won't hurt you—you're my sister. I want you to love me. When I found Light and got her out of that filthy
prison
they called a hospital I wanted her to love me, and she did, but it wasn't enough. I want you to love me too,” he said, his voice caressing.
Truth's mouth was dry; every nerve in her body ached with terror. Pilgrim wanted an answer, and she didn't dare lie.
“I want to love you, Pilgrim. So does Thorne.”
But that wasn't the right answer.
“Thorne!”
Pilgrim shrieked, furious again. “He doesn't love me—he ran out on us—out on
me
! And I don't care if he's sorry now—it's too
late
for him to be sorry!” he paused, panting.
“He shouldn't have done that, Pilgrim,” Truth said. She concentrated on the key in Pilgrim's pocket. She needed to get it—and get out of here. She didn't think the others
could
know what sort of monster Pilgrim was, and the only way to save any of them was by going to the police.
“No.” For a brief moment Truth saw tears glittering in Pilgrim's eyes as his mood made another maniacal shift. “I loved him—I believed in him—and then he was gone, and everyone …” Pilgrim drew a deep breath and rubbed his eyes.
“Won't you help me? Please, won't you help me, little sister? I didn't really hurt Ellis, you know,” he said, and Truth could see him trying to pull the shred of the Julian-mask around himself. “Or Michael. Michael had to go down to New York. He'll be back tomorrow. We're old friends—we went to seminary together. I'm sorry I scared you. The others understand. Magick is the redirection of reality by the exercise of the will. Sometimes we all get caught up in our own illusions. The rituals excite me, and we're so close … . Just twenty-four more hours.” Pilgrim bowed his head, the picture of contrition.
It would be so easy to believe him, and Truth wished she could. Inside herself she wept for the lover who had only been an illusion and for the brother she'd never known, but she was through lying to herself or letting others lie to her. She would do everything she could to help Pilgrim but she would begin by making herself and the others safe.
She waited for the next outburst, hardly daring to breathe, but Pilgrim did not move. Finally he seemed to shake himself awake, and sighed.
“Oh, well. We can always try again some other time. I don't suppose you'd agree to stay and say nothing if I gave you your book back?” Pilgrim laughed lightly, and by now the illusion of normalcy was almost complete.
Truth said nothing, not knowing what was safe, and what would trigger another shift toward violence. Finally Pilgrim seemed to give up trying to bend her to his will.
“Okay. I guess I deserve this. But before you go I need you to forgive me,” Pilgrim said. “Not for what I've done to anyone else—I know I can't ask that—but for what I've done to you. Please, can't I ask that much? You're my sister … .” Pilgrim held out Truth's untouched glass. “Please.”
Truth took it. Even then she might not have drunk it, but she saw Pilgrim watching her. To refuse would be to give him the excuse to do … what?
It would be safe enough. The glass held hardly more than a tablespoonful. Truth had seen both drinks poured from the same decanter, and Pilgrim had emptied his own glass. He placed the key to the door on the table in front of her and watched her through lowered lashes. Truth felt tears of pity gather in her eyes for the little boy who had suffered so much that he had become the man here with her now.
“I forgive you, Pilgrim,” Truth said, and drank.
She reached for the key.
Pilgrim smiled.
The wine had a bitter aftertaste. She felt the numbness on her tongue. And she tried to get up—to run, to fight him, to
scream
—but the wine was already turning her blood heavy and cold.
“Sucker.”
THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH
Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?
—JOHN MILTON
 
 
 
“I MUST SAY,” THORNE BLACKBURN SAID, “WHEN ONE of my offspring renounces common sense, there are no half measures involved.”
The voice penetrated her uncomfortable sleep. Truth tried to sit up and found herself unable to move.
The attempt brought full consciousness, and with it an awareness of her body. Aching shoulders, aching wrists, aching head, aching throat—everything hurt. And she wasn't lying down at all.
She pried her gummy eyes open with an effort and looked around.
She was sitting on a rough wooden bench somewhere that smelled of moist earth and old rot. There was a low wooden door directly opposite her, its wood the dusty gray of age and neglect. The beams of the low wooden ceiling began almost directly above it, and Truth could see cobwebs clustered in their angles. The walls were old rough handmade brick, their grayish mortar crumbling
away from between them. The floor was pounded earth, and the room itself was far from square.
At first she didn't see Thorne. She found that her hands were held level with the top of her head, and this time when she tried to move them she could hear a clinking and feel the cold unyielding metal of shackles about her wrists. She craned upward, staring. There was a shiny metal plate mortared into the wall. The ring in its center allowed the chain to pass through it freely; its three-foot length was attached to the shackles on her wrists. She yanked.
“Don't do that. You'll probably bring the wall down on top of you.”
“Huh—?” Truth said. She turned toward the voice and saw Thorne, standing in the far corner of the room as if he'd just come through the wall. The beams of the ceiling nearly brushed the crown of his head; the light she was seeing by came from the utterly prosaic Coleman lantern sitting on top of the ice chest at his feet. Thorne was wearing a fringed leather vest over an embroidered chambray shirt, and the bells of his jeans were so wide they hid his feet. He held up a key.
She'd never been so glad to see a ghost in her life.
“What—”
“The old wine cellar under the house. Or did you mean, ‘How did he drug you'? Simple enough. The drug was in the glass, not in the wine. It's an old trick, really,” Thorne said apologetically.
Truth shook her head, and was rewarded with a sharp jolt of pain and a reeling nausea. She lay back against the wall, panting.
“I'm going to let you out of those, but I need your help,” Thorne said. “I want you to stay here and go with them when they come back. That little bastard has to be stopped, and I don't want anyone else hurt.”
Truth nodded cautiously, though the effort made every tendon in her neck throb. She took a careful breath,
and felt the nausea recede. “I guess I really blew it, didn't it? I'm not a very good hero.”
Thorne smiled at her fondly and shook his head. “Oh, I don't doubt your bravery, baby—but I do wonder about your brains. What on earth possessed you to confront Pilgrim that way? He's nuts, you know,” Thorne told her.
“So I've heard,” Truth commented dryly.
Thorne crossed the little distance between them and reached for the cuff on her wrist. The cellar was cold; Truth could feel the heat radiating from Thorne's body—
—feel the grip of his hands as he steadied her wrist—
—see the makeup, carefully blended to cover the lines of age on his face; the hair, still long but now unnaturally golden—
One cuff sprang open, then the other.
“You're alive!” Truth yelped. She jumped up and grabbed his hands before he could pull back. They were hard and warm and real in hers—callused and worn and marked with age: the hands of a man in his fifties. Thorne's hands.
“You're alive,” Truth repeated.
“Surprise,” Thorne said, grinning.
Now that she looked for it, the mask of youth fell away—all it was was pancake and Clairol and expectation; antique clothes and careful lighting. This was no ghost. This was a living man, as real as she was.
“Oh, my God,” Truth said, sitting down slowly. Her head reeled, and she closed her eyes tightly.
“Want a beer?” Thorne said, dragging the ice chest out of the corner. There was a blanket on top of it; he shook it loose and draped it around her shoulders.
 
“I've been here since 'sixty-nine,” Thorne said. He was sitting beside her on the bench, his arm around her. Truth held a bottle of apple juice between her hands, and at intervals in his story Thorne would bully her into taking sips from it. “And with the muddle everything was left in
at my, ah, ‘death,' I expected I'd be able to stay here undisturbed until the end of my days.”
Truth sipped at the juice. Thorne's tale, delivered in simple, matter-of-fact tones, was almost more unbelievable than anything else she'd heard at Shadow's Gate.
“I admit that Pilgrim's arrival was a shock, but not half as much of one as I got when I found out what he was up to. I was sure he didn't stand a chance—I didn't know where
Venus Afflicted
was any more than he did, and at first I had no idea who he was or how much he'd found out. And later—Well, that was later.”
Truth reached out and patted his knee. “But how—? But why—? I mean, all these years, everyone was
looking
for you … .” She closed her eyes, stunned and exhausted with the aftermath of her drugging and these new revelations.
“Wake up. Drink your juice,” Thorne chided. “Well, to begin with, you may have noticed my rather unorthodox entrances and exists?”
Truth giggled, mostly with relief. “You scared me to
death
!”
“Hardly. You're like your mother—she'd walk up to Satan himself and spit in his eye to see him flinch. But playing ghost was easy—this place used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad that smuggled slaves into Canada. The place is riddled with tunnels.”
“But Hereward said they'd all been filled in—or something,” Truth protested, although by now she wasn't sure just
what
Hereward had said.
“What? Do you think they showed up on the architect's blueprints filed in the town hall? Nobody but the people who dug them ever knew they were there; the maze was built right over one of the main exits in eighteen ninety-something and nobody ever even noticed. Very convenient, those tunnels—I lived down there for quite some time while the heat died down.”
She wasn't crazy. Relief coursed through Truth like
strong medicine, warming and steadying her even more than a thick, woolen blanket and her father's presence. She wasn't crazy, she wasn't having a breakdown—Thorne was alive and
here.
“After awhile I started venturing out—scavenging, doing odd jobs for the locals as a means of barter, that sort of thing. I don't know whether they thought I was a draft dodger, a radical on the run, or what—and mostly they didn't care. Drink your juice.”
Truth sipped at it again—she was thirsty, but swallowing hurt. She was lucky, she supposed, that Pilgrim hadn't simply poisoned her.
“Pilgrim,” she said, trying to get up.
Thorne shoved her back down without effort. “You're in no shape to take on Pilgrim just now.”
Truth sat back, feeling the weakness in her body that told her Thorne was right. And there was so much she wanted to know; so many questions to ask.
“What about my mother?” she said.
Thorne sighed, and for a moment looked every day of his more than fifty years. “Grant me … a little more time before we talk about Katherine. I've stolen so much from you, daughter, but—just give me a little time.”
Truth nodded. “I hated you, you know,” she confessed, embarrassed. “I thought you were some kind of monster, stringing everyone along with your lies for what you could get out of them. But—”
“Oh, I was sincere,” Thorne said heavily. “God help me, that was the worst of my sins—that I
believed.
And I have sown dragon's teeth. Pilgrim—dear heaven, that my work could be so warped—what we did, we did in love and innocence, but all Pilgrim wants is
power
—the power that is bought with blood and lies and endless, endless pain. When I think of what he will do with it if he gets his way … I'm frightened.”
“But can't you—?” Truth said.
“Call the police? Oh, sure—and Pilgrim would have
my ass on toast and some fascist-pig lawyers to swear black was white and he'd be right back here next year with a new Circle ready to believe anything he told them. No, we have to close the Gate,” Thorne said solemnly. “And I need your help to do it.”
There was no Closing of the Gate in
Venus Afflicted
, but Truth supposed that Thorne could invent one if anybody could. “I'd almost forgotten you believed in all that nonsense,” Truth said before she thought. Thorne laughed.
“Humor your old dad, sweetheart. Once I've got Pilgrim out of the way you and I should be able to shut the whole thing down without any trouble. I've learned a lot in the last twenty years. You'd be surprised—that is, you would if you knew anything about magick to begin with,” Thorne amended wickedly.
“Don't worry—I won't ask you to do anything you can't stand up and confess to in church,” he added, grinning as if he guessed her worries. Then the smile faded. “But it's … the only way I can make it right, don't you see?” His voice was almost plaintive.
Truth squeezed his hand. She knew what he wanted, and it would have been easy to agree without thinking, but she was determined this time to make the
right
choice, not just the logical one. She was stronger now, her head clear—she could ask Thorne to lead her out of here, call the police as she'd originally planned, stop the ritual and stop Pilgrim.
But Thorne was right about the lawyers. And while it was true that she could accuse Pilgrim of murder …
which
time had he been lying about Michael and Ellis's fates? If she did accuse him of their murder, and they turned up alive and well … Truth shuddered at the thought of the media circus
that
would be.
And Thorne Blackburn was still wanted for murder, a crime for which there was no statute of limitations. There would be no way to keep him out of this, no matter what,
and in the frenzy surrounding Thorne's reappearance, any case against Pilgrim could simply disappear.
But suppose she and Thorne stopped Pilgrim's ritual first? If anything she'd been told was true, closing the Gate should shut down the paranormal activity at Shadow's Gate, just as she'd hoped. And then Pilgrim would not have the Circle's power to draw on—or the house's.
A month ago she would have called this line of thinking deluded raving—but she'd seen the members of the Circle, gray and drained, while Pilgrim bubbled with unwholesome vitality. She'd felt the power they raised, with the paranormal locus of Shadow's Gate to draw on.
Stop the ritual. Close the Gate. Seal the seeping psychic wound that tainted everything here, then settle the mundane matters.
That was the right thing to do.
“If I go along with you,” Truth said, “you won't hurt anyone, will you?”
Thorne grimaced. “I won't kill Pilgrim, if that's what you're hinting at—I've never killed anyone and I'm too old to start now. But I think I can get Irene to slip him a mickey, and failing that, I can always hit him over the head.” He smiled. “I think he at least deserves a headache.”
“So do I,” Truth said darkly, rubbing her own throbbing temples. “Okay, what do you want me to do?”
 
Thorne stayed with her a while longer. They talked of inconsequential things—books and movies, daily life at Taghkanic College. Truth found that Thorne's knowledge of popular culture stopped short in 1969—well, if he'd been living a fugitive's existence all these years, that was only to be expected. But toward the end he looked more and more uneasy, and finally admitted he ought to leave.
“There's not much I can do to pull the wool over their
eyes if they walk in and catch me here,” Thorne said apologetically.
“Go on, then. I'm not afraid of the dark.”
“Oh, I'll leave you the lantern and the rest of the stuff. Let them explain
that
as a ‘conflation of mystic energies,'” Thorne snorted. He stood to go.
Truth stood, too, and hugged him. He was only a few inches taller than she was, and what had once been the slenderness of youth was now the painful thinness of undernourished age.

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