Ghostlight (30 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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“There's always the Ritual of Anubis,” Hereward said provocatively.
“Yes,” Ellis said without comment. He saw Truth's look of incomprehension and relented, taking another sip from his glass. “Since you'll probably run into it in your research I'll tell you: The Ritual of Anubis is Blackburn's Smoothing of the Path with men substituting for the women's roles. It was published by the Circle of Fire—that's the Blackburn Lodge in San Francisco—”
“Naturally,” put in Hereward.
“But I don't know if it's ever actually been performed. If it had been, there'd be no trouble finding out where Thorne's grave was—all you'd have to do would be listen for the noise of him spinning in it.”
No matter how much Ellis had drunk—and Truth was beginning to suspect it was rather a lot—his sarcastically overprecise speech remained clear. And it was beginning to seem to Truth that the occult and the academic world had more in common than she'd originally thought—faction fights and disputes about material, a small, closed community where every one knew—and dished—every one else.
“Not to mention the trouble of finding a male trance
psychic over the age of consent for your Anubian Hierophex. Isn't it true that most mediums are women?” Hereward asked Truth.
She felt a gratitude at being asked a question to which she actually had the answer, and wondered if that had been Hereward's actual point.
“It does seem that way, but one of the most famous mediums on record—R. L. Lees—was male. He lived in nineteenth-century London and was even consulted about the Ripper murders. Another famous male medium from the period was Daniel D. Home; Houdini tried to debunk him and failed. But it's true that women outnumber men in the field by at least three to one. Maybe women are more comfortable with admitting that the world isn't, well, entirely susceptible to logical analysis,” Truth finished weakly.
“Isn't that the truth,” Ellis said bitterly.
“If the world were a logical place we'd all be Unitarians,” Hereward said, “and nobody'd fight over anything. But I've got to run—Julian gave me a shopping list, and I've got to go all the way to New York to get some of the items.”
Hereward stood up.
“If you're going to New York I'll go with you. I want to stop by my apartment and pick up some things,” Ellis said, finishing his drink and standing as well. He swayed a little and steadied himself with a hand on the table.
Hereward stopped in the act of pushing his chair in and looked sharply at Ellis.
“Yes, I know what he said,” Ellis said, as if Hereward had spoken, “but it isn't as if I contemplate appearing on
The Tonight Show
—which Our Founder did, in his day, may I remind you?—I just want to see if Dorian's watering the plants, pick up some winter clothes. It's freezing up here.”
Hereward raised his eyes ceilingward, as though soliciting heavenly help, and exhaled slowly. “On your
own head be it, my dear Gatekeeper,” he said at last. “But I'm not going to lie to Julian for you.” He picked up his—and Ellis's, Truth was relieved to see—dishes and headed for the kitchen.
So there was a rift in Julian's lute of New Age harmony, Truth thought, after the two men had left. The patter was glib and the anecdotes amusing, but underneath it all there was something they weren't saying, and she would dearly love to know what it was.
Light, dessert finished and soup abandoned, gathered up her things and stood to go.
“What about you?” Truth asked.
“I'll stay with you,” Light said.
 
Though welcome, Light was an unnerving companion to have. She followed Truth into the library and curled up in a sunny spot like a little cat, staring unblinkingly off into space. A few minutes later, Truth's speaking her name failed to rouse her.
Where had she gone? Truth looked into the wide-staring silver eyes and wondered. She did not try to rouse Light again; let the child alone, after all that people had done to her trying to change her.
Child? Truth questioned her own thoughts. If Light was indeed Thorne's daughter—and there didn't really seem to be much doubt of that—then she was twenty-seven at least, having been born—if she were indeed Debra Winwood's daughter—sometime before April 30, 1969. Truth thought again about Light's mother's suicide and flinched. What a dreadful beginning to a life that had held nothing but shadows.
Until Julian came along. Every time she started to cast Julian in the role of the Napoleon of modern crime, Truth told herself, she ought to remember how much he'd done for Light and knock it off at once. Julian, like everyone, surely had his dark places, but the good he had done was a matter of public record.
With a sigh, Truth turned to the file drawers, and Thorne Blackburn. He was still the one certain thing in her life—but it was hard, now, to remember that he wasn't a devil—only a charlatan of the occult: a showman, a fraud, a hypocrite.
And coming back from the dead, Truth told herself absurdly, didn't change what he'd done in life.
She began to read the letters that Julian had carefully collected and placed in chronological order. Thorne had kept up an extensive correspondence entirely in pen, and his letters often slid into illegibility, as well as gibberish—but the earliest one was dated 1959. Thorne was in New Orleans, and had a number of scathing things to say about the “tourist trade” Voudoun, ending with:
—I should throw open the Gates of Death and bring back Marie LaVeau to walk among die mundus, if only I weren't uncertain which of them would recoil in more horror—those corn-fed rubes, or the Witch Queen herself. Things have changed since the last time I was here—
At that point Thorne went on to blithely assert that the last time he'd been here, New Orleans had still been in French hands and that he found the city, especially Natchez Under Hill, much changed. The letter ended with a gracefully disguised plea for money, and several lines of what looked like Greek. Truth mistranslated it whimsically:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie/And with—something, something—even Death may die.”
In 1959 Thorne's apparent magickal mentor was H. P. Lovecraft, or at least Giuseppe Balsamo, Count Cagliostro—at least if he was claiming he was over a hundred years old.
“My father, the Vampire Lestat,” Truth groaned.
The letters got longer and longer, pages of minute script filled with elaborate explanations or refutations of occult
theories, but no matter what else he said, Thorne had been explicit from the first references that Truth had found that there was a gate between the world of the gods and the world of men that could be opened through magick.
In later letters he added the claim that he was of the “Old Blood”—the
sidhe
—and had been chosen by the gods to open the gate between the two worlds once more. Thorne referred to “the war” in several of the letters, and at first Truth thought he meant Vietnam, before realizing he meant World War II.
If Thorne had been thirty when he died or anything approaching it, he would have been born somewhere around 1939, and spent his earliest childhood with the war as backdrop. But references to his past were extremely slight, nearly inadvertent:
—since the war it has been clear to all individuals attuned to the higher vibrations that we are approaching the end of an era. Crowley thought the New Aeon had been declared in 1904, but he did not understand Aiwass; he was only a voice crying: “In the Wilderness, make straight the path!”—
It was fortunate, thought Truth, looking at the date on the letter, that the Great Beast had not lived to see himself demoted from Lucifer to John the Baptist. But Crowley had died in 1947; if his signature in the book from Thorne's library was not a forgery, it meant Thorne had known Crowley while Thorne was still a child.
Truth made a note to see if she could check out the Blackburn/Crowley connection, but Crowley's modern followers were a secretive lot, reasonable when you considered how much nonsense had been written about them.
So much to do …
Thorne's correspondence decreased—at least Julian's files held fewer letters—when Thorne started his underground newspaper in San Francisco. That purchase had
been bankrolled by one of his followers—as was the acquisition of the Haight-Ashbury house, the purchase of the Mystery Schoolbus, and, in the end, the acquisition of Shadow's Gate—all of which ended up in Thorne's name because, as he airily told his backers: “I cannot bear to live on charity, subject to another's whim.”
He'd been willing enough to accept large cash donations, though, and Truth, finally looking at the matter with something approaching dispassion, wondered how he'd gotten all of them; people with a lot of money were usually more careful about whom they gave it to.
But Thorne had seemed to possess an unerring radar for those who had money, and a totally unself-conscious charm that got it for him. The people living at Shadow's Gate in 1969 hadn't been ultimately released and cleared from any shadow of complicity in the death and disappearance out of a liberal spirit on the part of the local police, and certainly not because they were hippies. But they'd been
rich
hippies, if what Truth was turning up here was any indication.
“Not one of them below the rank of a stockbroker,” Truth murmured aloud. “Well, you know what they say; it's as easy to love a rich man as a poor one.” And Thorne had apparently found it easier.
But Truth found no indication, either in the letters he wrote or in the ones written to him, that Thorne Blackburn was fleecing his followers and funneling the money into his own pocket—at least not in the way she'd once thought. In the strictest sense, then, Thorne Blackburn was
not
a cheat, fraud, scoundrel, and con man.
It was true that Thorne had run through several fortunes that hadn't, originally, belonged to him, but he'd spent it all on what he called
the Work
—on extravagant follies like inlaying the floor of the Temple at Shadow's Gate with sterling silver. He'd certainly been manipulative and probably unscrupulous … .
“But his intentions were pure,” Truth said with a sigh.
Oh, Daddy, what am I going to do with you?
In the money-conscious, anti-greed nineties, she could ruin his reputation just by reporting his finances.
But did she want to do that? Really? Still?
“Julian's coming,” Light announced. Truth jumped at the unexpected sound of her sister's voice, and a moment later heard a gentle rapping on the door.
Julian was wearing a raw silk sweater with tweed slacks, and the combination gave him the air of a raffish jewel thief on vacation. He crossed the room to where Truth was standing and looked down at the papers.
“The story of a life interrupted?” he asked, picking up one of the letters and looking at it.
Looking at it in his hand, it was impossible not to calculate the capital outlay on Julian's part that the entire folder represented, these priceless, irreplaceable documents …
“Julian, how did you—I mean, it must have been difficult to …” Truth floundered.
“How many houses did I burgle?” Julian finished playfully.
His high spirits bordered on euphoria; Julian was more lighthearted than Truth had yet seen him. “There's no need to frown; the reality is far more mundane: I ran advertisements in the leading magickal journals and
bought
them, one way or another. Unfortunately, Thorne rarely kept the letters sent to him, so I'm afraid it's a rather one-sided correspondence, except in a few cases.”
She'd already noted that the files contained very few letters
to
Thorne, and if Julian's means hadn't turned up any other letters than these, it was hard for her to believe she could do any better with her own resources.
“Is this my cue to say there are some things money can't buy?” Truth asked lightly.
“True, oh, true—but very few,” Julian said, almost sing-songing. He seemed to collect himself, as if reigning in his febrile high spirits with an effort. “But those
are the most important things—the ones money can't buy—so I've found. And what have you found out about Thorne?”
“Not much—unless you count the fifty-cent tour of his magickal beliefs—and financial conquests,” Truth couldn't help but add. “Julian, you'll know if anyone will; where was he born? How did he get, um, involved in the occult?”
“How tactful,” Julian said, smiling at her, “when I'm sure that what you nearly said was ‘How did he get mixed up in this idiocy?'” He pulled out a chair beside her and sat down. “But that hardly answers your question.”
He held his hands out before him on the table, staring at his fingertips as if perhaps words might be written on them.
“As for what I know … Thorne was probably English, or at the very least, spent a great deal of time in England. His past is rather like an unfinished murder mystery, with a handful of clues and no explanation, and I'm afraid that all I have to offer you is a quarter century of accumulated legend and no more concrete facts.” Julian continued to study his fingertips, and inevitably Truth's gaze followed his, until they were both staring at those perfectly manicured ovals.

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