Bradley marion zimmer.., p.16
Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 01, page 16
"Thanks," said Truth, in tones of resignation. She slung the phone in its carrycase up over her shoulder. Yelling at the salesman would not accomplish anything, but she'd hoped to be able to use the phone today to call Aunt Caroline. The list of questions she had kept getting longer.
Had Blackburn known Shadow's Gate was haunted? Who was the baby in the photograph? How many children had the feckless Blackburn fathered—and where were they now? What did Aunt Caroline know about Julian Pilgrim, the new master of Shadow's Gate?
Oh, well, Truth thought philosophically. If she couldn't use her new acquisition, she could always use the pay phone in the library to call Stormlakken.
But when she got back to the Shadowkill Public Library, she found that the time to make her call had passed.
"I'm sorry, Ms. Jourdemayne." Janine's voice was flat and robotic. "Mrs. Jourdemayne passed away early this morning.
Truth clutched the receiver tightly to keep from dropping the phone. A claustrophobic weight settled over her—not even guilt, but the suffocating sense of having made some fatal and irrecoverable error.
"Should I come there?" Truth asked numbly.
"There really isn't any reason for you to," Janine admitted grudgingly. "She really had everything planned. The funeral home came and took the body this morning, and Mrs. Jourdemayne left a list of people to call with a friend of hers from the library; I'm just waiting for her to get here so I can hand over the keys. She had everything all planned," Janine said, in something like awe. "There's nothing left to do."
From a distance Truth heard herself mouth empty courtesies, and then at last she could put the receiver down and leave.
She walked aimlessly, taking no particular note of anything but the sidewalk beneath her feet. She didn't know how long she walked, but finally she stopped and, looking up, saw the graceful Gothic arch of a church door before her.
She looked at the sign out front. An Episcopal Church. She remembered Aunt Caroline taking her to Sunday School as a child, although she'd never been quite certain how much religion Aunt Caroline herself had possessed.
The door stood open. On an impulse, Truth went up the stairs and in.
The inside was quiet; dark after the sunlit street. There was a rose window behind the altar and high old-fashioned stained-glass windows on both sides of the church. It was peaceful; the polar opposite of the circular room at Shadow's Gate. As soon as her eyes adjusted, Truth found a pew and seated herself.
After a moment she began to twist uncomfortably in the seat. She'd meant to offer up some acknowledgment of Aunt Caroline's death; some formal response to her passing, but she couldn't. The wooden bench beneath her seemed almost impossibly uncomfortable, and the uninhabited silence clamored in her ears.
What are you seeking wisdom in the temple of the dead god for, Daughter of Earth? You are none of his!
It was only hyperactive imagination that shaped the words echoing on her inner ear, but it was just the sort of mystic, grandiloquent pronouncement Thorne Blackburn would make.
Daughter of Earth. Child of the sidhe . . .
Now, when it was far too late, Truth hated herself for every opportunity she had not taken, for every question she had not asked her aunt. Now her only source for information she could trust was gone forever—the woman who might have helped her build a bridge between what she was and what she had become—or was becoming.
Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourselj7 Truth scolded herself fiercely. She'd known Aunt Caroline was dying—she ought to be happy that the woman who had raised her had been spared the final indignity of impersonal hospitals and clinical care. Caroline Jourdemayne had died in her own bed, that was something to be happy for. Since her twin Katherine's death, Caroline's life had been a burden and a responsibility, not a joy, and now she was free.
Truth should be happy for her.
Then why was she so afraid . . . ?
With the faint sense of another escape route closing behind her, Truth rose and left the church.
"I've found another book for you," Laurel Villanova said triumphantly.
It was just after one o'clock, and Truth had come back to the library to bury all her emotional turmoil in a search for the history of Shadow's Gate. Work had always been her escape, Truth realized, an escape so laudable that few people saw it for what it was: flight from a reality that held nothing but pain and a world in which she did not belong.
It had always worked before. It would work now. Gratefully she put away all the sadness of the day; she would solve the riddle of Shadow's Gate—and of Thorne Blackburn.
With a grateful smile, Truth took the dusty green-bound volume from Laurel and set it down on the table.
The River Where The Ghosts Walk: A Haunted History of the Hudson Valley, said the title. Truth opened it, frowning. Blackburn had also owned a copy of this book—Truth had seen it in Julian's collection.
Copyright 1938. She nipped to the table of contents.
"There's a chapter on Shadow's Gate," Laurel said helpfully. "I've marked it for you."
Truth saw the colored paper marker and turned to the indicated chapter. Facing the first page was a bound-in photo on glossy stock of a rambling Federalist house, built long and low in the style of eighteenth-century Colonial architecture and lime washed to a flat white. Beneath the picture was the legend: "Shadow's Gate, built 1780. 1869 photo."
She was looking at a picture of the third house.
Time fell away as Truth Jourdemayne did what she had been trained to do: search the facts and find the truth beyond. The books she had used the day before were still handy to hand on the long table in the Local History Room, and Truth had the notes she had taken to help her as well.
Time passed, and slowly, cross-checked but with many question marks remaining, the story took shape.
In 1780, in the first years of the new Republic, a third building was erected—"and we shall call it Shadowsgate, after the style of Elkanah Scheidow who first settled here"—on the site of Scheidow's first trading post, which Truth now knew to have been situated beside the spring that was the source of the local kill, or stream. No wonder they'd called it Scheidow's kill, if he'd built his business right beside it.
The 1780 house, which was to vanish from the local historical records less than a century later, was built by one of the patroons' descendants. In the nearly century and a half since Elkanah Scheidow had first come to what was then a lush and forbidding wilderness, the family's fortunes had prospered. Each generation built upon the wealth of the last, and, through all the political shifts and upsets of fate, the Scheidow family had managed to hang on to a great deal of the land originally granted to it, and re-granted in turn by the British and the new American government. Land was wealth. The new house was to reflect this. Its windows came from Holland, its stone masons from New-York City.
It was almost enough to compensate for the other widely-known fact about the Scheidow lineage.
A century and a half previously, Elkanah Scheidow had shrewdly expropriated one of the local Indian tribes' sacred places as the site of his business. Possibly his original intention had been only to build his trading post on neutral ground in order to minimize tribal feuding, but the effect had been to make himself an envoy of the manitou, the guardians of the Native American spirit world. With so much invisible authority supporting him, Elkanah's business had prospered—at a cost.
The manitou, if gossip of the period could be believed, were quite content with the interloper's presence—providing they were served as they had always been. As early as 1780 an odd aura of misfortune already hovered over what would someday be known as Shadow's Gate.
Truth pieced together from the genealogical records a tale of nagging, recurring misfortune: this child dead in infancy, that in childhood. So many of them drowned in the spring that had been the source of stream and town alike that in 1684 Scheidow's grandson, after the drowning death of his youngest brother, had it lined and capped as if it were a well and built a well house over the site—with a door to which he held the only key. He'd died soon after, by means the sources available to Truth did not name, but it was so easy to think of him walking out from the house one night in the storm, unlocking the well house and passing within, opening the cover over the well and climbing down into it, and pulling the cover back over the well from the inside.
Truth gave herself a mental shake, reminding herself that she didn't know and would never know how Tobias Scheidow had died. What she did know was that at the time of the building of the third house, the well had been incorporated into the building itself, and all trace of its location destroyed forever.
With the capping of the spring in 1684, the reports of drownings disappeared from the local records, but the other afflictions seemed far from diminished. And once in each generation, a member of the family simply—vanished.
There were any number of explanations for the sudden omission: marriage, unrecorded death, family scandal. Truth fretted at her lack of ability to prove, but she really didn't have the resources available to determine that each disappearance really was that mysterious. But disappear the Scheidow descendants did, and not children either: once every twenty-five years or so, an adult member of the family simply . . . vanished . . . from Shadow's Gate.
The family had become important in Dutchess County, both financially and politically; in those days a Scheidow's word was law and sensational scandal something to be avoided. There was no hint in any of the local papers or family histories Truth consulted of shocking disappearances and shameful flights.
But in contrast to the newspapers and the histories, the Scheidow genealogies had been kept with a scrupulous regard for the truth, and once you began looking for the pattern you were certain of finding it. One adult, each generation, gone without an obituary to record the passing in a paper that scrupulously noted the births, deaths, and marriages of the descendants of the founder of the town.
The other things Truth uncovered, checking as far as she could the undocumented claims of The River Where The Ghosts Walk, seemed to fit the developing pattern—one might almost call it the Amityville Syndrome—that she had learned to look for when hauntings were inferred.
There were continuing reports of a black dog that walked through walls, of lights in odd places and times, a coldness that did not dissipate, the unexplained flight of houseguests. By the 1800s, so The River Where The Ghosts Walk assured her, it was commonly known as far away as New York City that the Scheidow house was haunted.
As for the crowning event the book related, it would take Truth years of research to confirm it—or deny it—in its entirety. It seemed to be the stuff of pulp fiction and supermarket press, even compiled, as it had been, some sixty years after the incident, the author claiming to have been a child living in Shadowkill at the time.
Briefly stated, the "facts," if you could claim there were any, were these: In April 1872, Elijah Cheddow, formerly a captain of Union forces in the late Insurrection of the Southern States, took an axe to his wife, twin daughters, and infant son, as well as to all servants living in the house, and then set the house on fire, burning it to the ground.
Their death dates, recorded in the genealogy, matched. There had certainly been a fire, according to the newspaper, but the story was almost maddeningly tactful, confining itself to a bare-bones report that a fire had occurred but had not spread. It did not even mention any deaths, though when Truth cross-checked the Cheddow genealogy, the death dates for Sarah, Elizabeth, Amy, and Infant Cheddow matched.
There was no recorded death date for Elijah.
As for the rest of the grisly tale, it received a resounding "Not Proven," that so-convenient verdict surviving only in Scots jurisprudence, and an entombment in local legend. A bang-up ending to what was probably a very unpleasant family, only it wasn't the end, as a distant cousin, Nathaniel Cheddow, came forward and, impelled by God alone knew what reason, built yet another house on that ill-starred site—
"Ms. Jourdemayne? It's six-thirty. We're closing."
Truth blinked up dazedly at Laurel, only now noticing the dimness of the room in which she worked. Then the librarian's words penetrated.
"Six-thirty" she groaned. She was late, she knew that much, even if just now she wasn't sure for what. Truth scooped up her notes and sketches and scrambled stiffly to her feet. Slinging her purse over her shoulder, she juggled the books in her arms possessively. "Can I borrow these?"
Laurel hesitated. "Well, we don't usually like to let them circulate, but you are on the faculty at Taghkanic. ... I guess it's okay."
Truth didn't correct Laurel's misapprehension, since she did want the books. And besides, she worked at Taghkanic, if not for it. She presented her library card, signed out the books in the local history ledger, and left the library just short of a dead run, blessing the impulse that had caused her to bring her car with her this morning. In moments she was on her way up the road to Shadow's Gate.
Which was a haunted house. A world-class, A-number-one, for-the-record-books haunted house, to rank right up there with any Irish castle you wanted to name.
And which explained everything Truth needed to know about Thorne Blackburn.
The gates up to the house were shut when she crossed the road and drove in under the gatehouse arch. She was about to get out and try to open them herself when Gareth came out of one of the gatehouse rooms, blinking in the glare of her headlights. Standing behind the bars, he looked like some kind of wild thing in a cage.
When he saw who it was he did something at the lock plate that she couldn't see, then swung one wing of the ornate iron gate open, stepping through to talk to her.
"Good thing you showed up, Truth. I was about to bolt the gates for the night. You'd have had to phone the house then, or just leave your car here and walk up."
Gareth indicated a phone box on the wall of the drive-through, which reminded Truth of the cellular phone she'd rented just that morning. She felt a hidden surge of triumph: She had resources Shadow's Gate didn't know of.
Shadow's Gate? Or Julian?
"Thanks for being here. I hope nobody was worried; I got involved in a line of research and lost track of time." She felt, obscurely, that Gareth deserved some sort of explanation. And Julian deserved an apology. She was treating Shadow's Gate as if it were an hotel!
Gareth grinned. "That's an explanation Julian can empathize with— sometimes he goes off to the library and gets lost for weeks. I'll phone him and let him know you're back so you can just go ahead and clean up. Dinner's at seven-thirty."
"Eating tonight?" Truth joked. She was instantly sorry she had at the expression that crossed Gareth's face; a slightly shuttered, slightly furtive look that did not go well with his open, generous features.
"Yeah. Um. Well—see you there." He swung the other half of the gate open and stepped back, waving her on.
She drove past him slowly. Her car's headlights cut bright arcs through the woods growing up close on each side of the drive. In mid-October almost everything still on the branches was yellow or orange or red, and the drifts underfoot made the traction slippery.
She was forcibly reminded of this when the deer suddenly appeared, standing transfixed in the headlights. It was huge; its coat was a ruddy fox color and its splendid rack of antlers gleamed like polished golden oak. It was the biggest deer she'd ever seen.
She tried to stop, but instantly realized she couldn't; the car began to skid, its back end edging forward until it seemed that rather than missing the deer, she was going to hit it broadside—killing it and probably totaling her car, if nothing worse.
Frantically Truth waged war against the laws of physics, twisting her wheel against the skid while feathering the brake. Finally the car slid to a stop.
She looked around. The deer that had caused all this fuss was nowhere to be seen.
Truth rolled her window down and scanned the horizon for it, although she knew it was probably miles away by now—she certainly hadn't hit it! She didn't see it, but while she was looking, a white blur off to the left caught her attention. White, and four-legged . . . She peered toward it, wondering if it were a white deer, but realized it was a white horse instead. Its eyes flashed red in the shine from her headlights as it turned and ran, becoming first a flicker in the woods, then a blur, then gone. Truth saw no rider. As she listened, the sound of its hoofbeats gradually diminished into silence, and the adrenaline rush that had sustained her passed, leaving her cold and sick.
You're lucky you weren't killed! Truth told herself unsteadily. Now that it was over she realized how lucky she'd been; she hadn't been going that fast, but running into that deer—
Truth frowned, starting the car up the drive once more. The deer that came onto the campus each Fall to steal the apples looked nothing like that. It had been about twice their size, for one thing, and its red coat a far cry from the winter-dun color of the Taghkanic deer's autumnal coats.
Not a deer at all. A stag.
What she had caught in her car's headlights had been the living image of that oft-copied Landseer painting, Monarch of the Glen—a great, red-coated stag; lord of Scotland and Ireland's high places.
And the white horse . . .
"The red stag and the white mare," Truth said aloud, thinking of what she'd seen and remembering Light's words again. But they hadn't been conjured up by Light's visions. Far from it—they were probably the cause of them: In this area many people kept back-bred or exotic livestock, from ostriches to aurochs, and Shadowkill was only a few miles from the famous Millbrook Hunt Country with its world-famous horse farms. Easy enough to find a red stag and a white mare in all of that—they'd probably gotten used to roving the property while it had stood unoccupied. Maybe they even belonged to Julian.
Just as long as he doesn't turn up a gray wolf, the black dog I can handle, Truth thought with a flash of saving humor.
