Ghostlight, p.22
Ghostlight, page 22
“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 CO2 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.
If she could.
“Dylan? It’s Truth.”
“Truth! Hey, this is great! Where are you?” Dylan was unfeignedly glad to hear from her, and Truth felt a faint twinge of guilt for the fact that she was only calling to beg a favor.
“I’m in a little place called Shadowkill. It’s in Dutchess, I came here to see Shadow’s Gate, and—”
The practiced phrases came easily to her tongue; the history of the house as she had unearthed it; her belief that it was a center of paranormal energy, the events that had occurred in the house so far.
“—just a little PK and some channeling; a cold spot in the library but I don’t think that’s where the real action is. There’s a trance medium living there, and—” And she’s my sister, Truth added silently. She went on explaining what she’d learned and what she’d guessed.
“—he’s not really interested in strangers showing up around the place, but he doesn’t have too much objection to the monitoring equipment, so I thought—”
She’d come back to the library in Shadowkill to use its phone, and was perched on the narrow, angular bench in its old-fashioned wooden booth. Through the glass door she could see the library information desk, and the rows and rows of books in their turn-of-the-century shelving beyond.
Shadowkill was a nice town, simple and friendly. Then why did she feel so afraid—as if there were something she would soon try to protect it from, and fail?
“What? Dylan, I didn’t hear you.” Abruptly conscious that her mind was wandering, Truth was jolted back to the present by the interrogative note in Dylan’s tone.
“I said, why not let me drive up this weekend with a truck and a couple of my grad students and set the stuff up and run a few tests. I can take you out to dinner, and—”
“No.” The refusal was so instantaneous that it was rude, and she hastened to amend it. “Julian doesn’t want any strangers here.”
There was a pause. “Ah,” Dylan said, and now some of the warmth was gone from his voice. “Julian, is it? The reclusive new master of Shadow’s Gate?”
“Honestly, Dylan, you sound like a bad Gothic novel,” Truth snapped. At the moment she didn’t remember her wistful fantasies of opportunities lost; she was thoroughly irritated with Dylan and it was difficult to recall that she was trying to get him to do what she wanted.
“It’s just that—Look, of course the man is filthy rich and could probably afford to buy the Institute’s whole array out of pocket change—”
Dylan laughed. “Not unless his pockets are two point five million dollars deep.”
“Well, they may be,” Truth said, thinking of what she’d seen so far. There was a silence.
“He’s doing the Blackburn Work,” Truth blurted out suddenly.
“Does he know who you are?” Dylan asked carefully.
“Yes.” To the devil, a daughter. “It’s just that I—I have—My sister’s here, Dylan, and—”
“I’m coming down there,” Dylan said, cutting her off. “You don’t know what you’re getting into with these people.”
His matter-of-fact assumption of the right to meddle grated on her sensibilities, but a chill distant part of her was amused—that this innocent should be presuming to protect her, all unknowing of what she was.
The moment passed.
“If you know, Dylan, then I’m worried about you,” Truth said, fighting for lightness. “And I, of all people, know exactly what ‘these people’ are like.”
“A sister. You said a sister,” Dylan said. He sounded flustered.
“Blackburn fathered other children,” Truth said baldly. “One of them is here. That’s all.”
There was a fulminating silence on the other end of the line that told Truth that, in Dylan’s opinion, that was far from all.
This conversation was not going well at all. Had she always been this clumsy in her handling of other people? Or was it only because Dylan Palmer took the time to try to pierce her chilly armor?
A choice, her inner intuition whispered. You have a choice to make here, Daughter of Earth.
“Look,” Truth said, trying to bring the subject back on track. “The important thing right now is to map the extent of the Paranormal Event taking place in Shadow’s Gate. Julian’s willing to have you bring a team up to the house in November and do anything you want, but I really think we need to start mapping now. I need you.” It’s dangerous here, Dylan, but if I tell you that you won’t listen to anything else I say.
Truth broke off, sighing, and rubbed her forehead with her free hand. Her sleepless night made her bones ache with exhaustion, but it wasn’t only that. Everything seemed to be tiring these days, as if her weariness formed the invisible walls that constrained her to follow the path appointed for her.
“I need you,” she repeated, “to get me the equipment. The cameras. Some of the monitors. I know what I’m asking, Dylan—”
“No, I don’t think you do,” he said quietly, and the conversation died again.
“What do I have to say to make you do what I want?” Truth blurted out in frustration. If this was a sample of the sort of so-called normal life people were always urging on her, she’d stay the way she was, thank you. “I need those monitors. I need to know. Before someone gets hurt,” she added in an undertone.
Over the long-distance line she heard Dylan sigh.
“Truth, it’s not that—These monitors aren’t cheap. Even if I only bring up one of the barometric arrays and a camera … Do you know that film costs one hundred twenty dollars a roll? Which budget line am I supposed to hide those costs in?”
“I’ll pay for it myself,” Truth muttered.
“It doesn’t work that way. Truth—” She heard him sigh again, and imagined she could feel his breath stir the tendrils of hair coiling against her cheek—and did that image repel or attract her? “What are you doing up there?” Dylan asked helplessly.
