Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 01, page 11
How had she gotten here? The path from her room to the stairs was very straightforward: down to the end of the hall, turn right, and the stairs were at the end. The picture of the dark oak newel posts carved with acanthus leaves was sharp in her mind.
The stairs had to be around here somewhere.
She backtracked, feeling certain she should be able to at least find her room again, and instead found herself faced with a narrow, unfamiliar flight of stairs going up.
This is ridiculous. I was up and down that front staircase twice last night— and I haven't taken any stairs this morning. Truth frowned. Julian had certainly hinted heavily enough that Shadow's Gate was haunted, and this kind of spatial disorientation was a common "symptom" of the kind of paranormal events associated with so-called haunted houses.
Of course, getting lost might also simply be the result of a combination of too little sleep and too much incense—assuming she hadn't dreamed it. But no, her room had still smelled faintly of incense when she'd awakened this morning. For a moment Truth's mind flicked back to that disembodied voice of the night before. Had it really happened—and if so, was it an indication of a haunting?
Even allowing for the voice being natural instead of supernatural, it presented a pretty puzzle. Who had been speaking and who had been being told to get out? She didn't think the speaker had been either Julian or Michael, and she hadn't heard the other men talk enough to be certain about identifying their voices.
By a determined counting of steps and turns, Truth regained first the familiarly-patterned wallpaper and then her own bedroom door.
She looked back the way she had come. The hall looked "normal" up to the turn—and at the moment, Truth wasn't willing to go and check what might lay beyond. She stood with her back to her door for a moment, consciously calling up a picture in her mind of the route to the stairs before setting off again. This time she found them easily—the only mystery was how she'd managed to miss them in the first place.
As she started down she glanced again at her watch and felt a sick pang of alarm lance through her.
The watch's hands registered eleven o'clock, and the steady motion of the second hand testified to the fact that her battery, at least, was still working.
Only she'd left her room at about eleven, and she'd been wandering through the halls looking for the stairs for at least twenty minutes.
How could it still be eleven o'clock?
By the time she reached the dining room Truth had pushed this latest disturbing addition to her steadily growing list of questions to the back of her mind. She couldn't come up with answers to these puzzles alone— and it was starting to become disturbingly apparent that no one here in Shadow's Gate would have any answers to give her that didn't involve the intercession of Thorne Blackburn.
Oddly enough there was no scent of incense anywhere on the ground floor, although almost certainly the Temple must be here. She wondered exactly where the Temple was, and thought with a traitorous flutter in the pit of her stomach that undoubtedly it wouldn't be at all difficult to get Julian to show it to her.
The doors to the dining room were open; when she glanced through them she was surprised to see Ellis Gardner, presiding over the deserted table like a reigning monarch. He smiled when he saw her.
"Well, my dear, you're up early. Come, have some coffee—the power came back on sometime in the early hours and Mr. Hoskins has provided us with the necessities. We're less formal than at dinner, you will note."
He gestured to the basket of rolls and the thermal carafe on the table. On the sideboard, the silver candelabra of the night before had been replaced by stacked cups waiting, hotel-style, for use.
"There's no need to be quite so offensive," Truth said, selecting a cup from the sideboard. "1 know it's after eleven, but I overslept."
Somehow, the small inward voice commented.
Ellis's eyes opened wide in genuine surprise. "My dear girl—or should it be 'woman' in these decadent days?—I meant it in all sincerity," he protested. "I didn't expect to see anyone else for hours yet. Between Julian's all-night rituals and Michael's all-night prayers, there's usually not a creature stirring here before two in the afternoon."
"Prayers?" Truth asked, sitting down within reach of the coffee. Praying seemed an odd occupation for a magician.
"Oh yes, indeed," Ellis said with relish. "Our fallen Archangel is not what he seems—but then, the Roman collar is a trifle archaic, fashion-wise, and does tend to put people off, so its omission should come as no surprise." Ellis pushed the carafe toward her.
"You're saying he's a priest," Truth said. She picked up the pot and poured, and the rich fragrance of freshly ground and freshly brewed Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee surrounded her. She inhaled deeply.
"A lay brother, merely," Ellis said with arch courteousness, "serving in some humble capacity with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—or, as it was formerly known, the Holy Office of the Question."
"Michael's a member of the Inquisition?" Truth said incredulously, once she'd sorted out what Ellis had said. "You've got to be kidding!" She'd never seen anyone who looked less like a priest—or an Inquisitor.
"If I must, I must," Ellis said dismissively. "But you might ask him sometime who he is, and what he's doing in Julian's library. Oh, and you might ask why he and Julian have concocted that silly cover story between them."
Ellis had the look of one who wanted to be badgered into giving up his secrets, and though Truth wasn't certain that she had the stamina for it this morning, under the tonic influence of coffee she decided to take a stab at it.
"Okay, Ellis, I'll bite: What cover story?"
Ellis paused to sip at his coffee—or, judging from the smell, coffee and brandy. She remembered what Julian had said last night about Ellis's drinking. Apparently it was both heavy and chronic.
"That Michael and Julian are old friends. They aren't, you know. I've known Julian longer than anyone here, and I can swear to that," Ellis said.
" 'And why are you telling all this to me, a traveling musician?" Truth asked, quoting W. S. Gilbert to good purpose.
'' 'I spend my time walking up and down in the world, seeing what mischief I may perform,' " Ellis responded, capping her quotation with one of his own. "And as you're Thome's daughter, I felt you ought not to operate under so much of a handicap."
While she was no more resigned to that relationship, Truth was certainly becoming more desensitized to it through these constant reminders of it by everyone she met.
"Did you know Thorne Blackburn?" she asked. She wondered what imp of perversity possessed her to act so against her own deepest desires. She certainly didn't want to hear about Blackburn over morning coffee.
And she was pretty sure the answer would be no, anyway—Ellis looked to be in his forties, not old enough to know a man who had died twenty-six years before.
"I met him once," Ellis answered, surprisingly. "Nineteen sixty-seven; I was seventeen. The Glass Key opened for him on the East Coast leg of the Universal Mystery Tour."
The Universal Mystery Tour had been Thorne Blackburn's melding of music and magic; six weeks of barely-controlled chaos; Blackburn's last big public display before vanishing into the wilds of Upstate New York.
"So you're an ex—rock'n'roll star?" Truth asked, trying for a light touch. It was hard to believe, looking at Ellis's tweedy professorial bearing.
"Every man and every woman is a star," Ellis said, "As Nietzsche didn't precisely say. I was their drummer; in fact, I think there are some pictures of Glass Key in the collection—Thorne used to photograph everything, and Julian found several albums full of old photographs here when we moved in."
Ellis's face was wistful, looking back to a time that had held more of joy and meaning than the present did.
"Ellis, why are you here?" Truth asked intently.
He blinked, focusing on her once more. "Where else should I be? The heart has its reasons." He gestured, waving the question away. "But you'll be wanting to go about your father's business. A word of advice first, if I may."
Truth, struck spellbound by the change in his manner, nodded assent.
"First, remember that the old saying 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' is not so very often true. Beware our friend Michael: Ultimate goodness has so little in common with humanity that it might as well be its opposite."
"And second?" asked Truth, with what she felt was admirable composure.
"When dealing with that which you do not understand, to thine own self be true. Honesty is the best policy, so remember that you are human, dear Truth—or nearly so."
Ellis moved with the expert grace of the veteran actor, and so he had crossed the room before Truth realized he was moving. The closing of the dining room door behind him followed so neatly on the end of his exit speech that it took Truth a moment to realize what he'd said.
"Remember you're human, or nearly so?" What the hell is that supposed to mean?
It was, she supposed peevishly, another piece of the great Blackburn riddle. Everyone here must have some sort of connection to Blackburn, even though Julian, Gareth, Donner, Caradoc, and Hereward—and, to be fair, Fiona—could only have been children when Blackburn had been alive.
And, dammit, she hadn't had a chance to ask him about Julian.
She brooded through a roll and a second cup of hot coffee, filing Ellis's cryptic and unbelievable revelations and warnings about Michael in the same mental folder as all the peculiar things that had happened to her since she got here.
If they'd really happened. If she weren't just having some kind of causeless breakdown.
She lingered as long as she could bear to but no one came to join her. The only sounds anywhere were the faint clinks and thumpings of food preparation coming from the kitchen, and she was forced to the conclusion that Ellis was at least being accurate about the household's nocturnal habits. Julian was probably still in his bed. The entry hall and the stairs above held nothing but silence when Truth made her cautious way from the dining room to the room housing the Blackburn collection.
The wide, spacious room looked inviting with the late-morning sun streaming in through the high, uncurtained windows. Truth set down her coffee cup carefully, out of the way of anything made of paper, and resumed exploring the material.
Odd. Both Julian and Ellis said that Michael ivas doing research here at Shadow's Gate, but this isn't an exhaustive collection on anything but Thome Blackburn, and Michael doesn't seem to be researching him—and if Ellis were telling the truth about Michael being a, a "lay brother," Michael would have access to the Vatican Library, wouldn't he? And the Vatican has the largest collection of books on sorcery in the world.
She filed one more thing away to brood about later; at the moment her business was backtrailing Thorne Blackburn. Ellis had said there were pictures here, and Truth hoped they would tell her more than the confusing papers she'd stumbled across yesterday. They said one picture was worth a thousand words, after all.
Her heart beat fast with the sheer reaction of at last confronting the enigmatic spirit that had overshadowed her young adulthood. She was repelled by everything Thorne Blackburn seemed to stand for, but, approaching him with a scholar's discipline, she found she could consider even Thorne Blackburn with a certain detachment.
The collection that Julian had amassed was even more complete than she had thought the day before. As she browsed through the shelves and drawers, making mental notes on what areas to tackle in-depth first, she found numerous testaments to Julian's encyclopedic thoroughness.
A number of record albums—their reason for inclusion uncertain, except for the one by Glass Key that had a photograph on it of a very young Ellis Gardner behind a psychedelically painted drum set.
Several videocassettes carefully labeled as copies of Blackburn's media appearances, including his infamous Johnny Carson guest shot and the segment of The Ed Sullivan Show that only the live studio audience had gotten to see. There was a rumor that Blackburn had been on The Dating Game, as well.
A VCR stood ready in case she wanted to run any of these, and despite her self-control and best intentions, Truth felt the hair on her arms and neck stand up straight at the prospect of confronting a moving, talking image of Thorne Blackburn.
Grow up! Truth scolded herself. A picture couldn't hurt her, and she'd have to delve more deeply than this into Blackburn's life if she meant to debunk him thoroughly. She'd run the tapes later, just to get them out of the way. Right now she had another goal in mind.
After a little more searching she found them: five thick, old-fashioned photo albums, slightly battered and carrying a psychic aura of dust for all that they were newly clean.
They were stored archivally, lying on their sides on a wide bottom shelf, and Truth picked them up one by one and toted them over to the table. Set side by side, the five volumes nearly covered the surface of the long table. She pulled the nearest one closer to her and lifted the cover.
The album's pages gave off the sweet, musty smell of a long-shelved book as she opened it. These must be the original albums that Julian had found in the attic; these pictures ought to be removed, cataloged, copied, and conservation-mounted to protect them further.
Carefully she lifted the cover page. The pages were a rough, creamy oak-tag paper, and the pictures—some black-and-white, some color— were held down with small paper corners, or in some cases, yellowed and disintegrating Scotch tape. Some of the pictures had writing of their same ancient vintage beneath them in a slapdash, unfamiliar hand. Blackburn's?
Kate in the Hashbury, one entry said cryptically, beneath a faded color picture of a laughing, dark-haired girl in an ankle-length, high-waisted dress and braided headband. Truth could see a slice of a white Victorian house in the background, an American flag hanging in an upper window. The girl wore tiny, square, wire-rimmed glasses with pink lenses, and a peace symbol flashed among the love beads around her neck. Across a quarter of a century she smiled into the lens of an unknown photographer, her hand raised in a "V" sign. A peace sign, Truth remembered, dredging up the fact from some well of antique trivia. Kate in the Hasbury. Haight-Asbbury. San Francisco.
Kate. Katherine.
Mommy. Truth's lips moved soundlessly over the word. With a careful fingertip she touched the image. This was Katherine Jourdemayne, and if Truth could somehow step into the picture she would stand face to face with a girl younger than she was, a girl who believed that love and magick could change the world.
She glanced at the other pictures on the page. All of them seemed to be taken in San Francisco sometime in the early middle sixties. One of them looked as if it might be Irene as she'd been then, the sagging lines of age erased, the white hair darkened to a flaming red.
Another photo that caught her eye was a picture of a man and woman, surprisingly respectable considering the company their photo was in. If Blackburn had taken these he must have known them, but who were they? She studied the picture more closely, finding something elusively familiar in the image. The man was somewhere in early middle age, Truth guessed, dressed in a faintly archaic sport coat and slacks. He looked vaguely Scots, with a high square forehead and a firm chin. Even in the faded picture his eyes were a piercing pale blue, and his bulldog stubbornness seemed an essential part of what he was.
The woman beside him was nearly as tall as he—uncommonly tall for a woman—with gray eyes and wavy pale hair. She reminded Truth oddly of Light, though the two women looked nothing alike, and the woman in the picture had the sort of face that is good rather than pretty. She wore a neat dress and hat, the counterpoint to the tall man's respectable clothing. After a moment Truth could make out a caption, written in faint pencil: Colin and Claire—the loyal opposition—Golden Gate Park, 1966.
Colin MacLaren and Claire Mo/fat. Truth's fingers itched to remove the photo and take it away with her, while her scholar's instincts kept her from doing so. Here was proof that Professor MacLaren had known Thorne Blackburn.
But it's not exactly a capital crime, is it? Truth thought through her rising excitement. I wonder if Julian will let me get any of these pictures copied? A book's better with pictures. And I wonder if I could get an interview with Professor MacLaren. I know he retired from the Institute several years ago. I wonder where he is now? Dylan would know.
Thinking about Dylan made her feel oddly guilty, as if she'd done Dylan Palmer some treacherous harm. Truth examined her conscience scrupulously and couldn't think of any; it was true they hadn't parted on the best of terms, but that was no reason for this sudden pang of conscience.
Displacement. That's what the headshrinkers call it. You're worried about something, so you pretend you're worried about something else. Simple.
Truth gnawed her lip, wondering if she should give Dylan a call anyway.
And tell him what?
Sighing, Truth went back to the photos. Most of the pictures in this first book were captioned, but some were not. There was a picture of a deaccessioned schoolbus with the words MYSTERY SCHOOLBUS painted on the side and a group of people standing in front of it, Irene and Katherine among them. Katherine wore bell-bottomed jeans and a chambray shirt tied snugly beneath her breasts, and was smiling radiantly at the photographer. Thorne Blackburn. Always the photographer, never the image, as if he'd keep his secrets even from film.
She flipped through more quickly now, hunting fruitlessly for a picture of Blackburn. Near the end she was stopped momentarily by a studio portrait of a man in a cowboy outfit straight from a Wild West show— except for the alchemical symbols embroidered on his shirt and the stars and moons painted on his black Stetson.
The note under the picture said merely Tex Arcana, leaving Truth to wonder who—or what—he was. Or had been. But the past kept its secrets. She slid the first album away and drew another one toward her.
Blackburn at last.
