Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 01, page 13
Coincidence, Truth told herself firmly. /f was raining outside—why shouldn't you dream of rain? The faint nagging feeling that there must be some connection between her dream and the condition of Mary Lind-holm's Shadowkill Bed-and-Breakfast was easy to dismiss; science was a great believer in coincidence.
She parked in the public parking located in the center of town and set off on foot. The October sun, unseasonably strong, was a welcome warmth on her shoulders, and the brightly-decked shops on every side gave a welcome respite from the problems plaguing her.
A rumbling in her stomach reminded her that coffee and bread at eleven wasn't much in the way of either breakfast or lunch. Truth stopped at a sidewalk deli and bought a salad and coffee. Sitting at one of the outside tables provided for customers, she caught sight of a green-and-white sign that told her what her next stop must be.
The Shadowkill Public Library was housed in a turn-of-the-century building that had the grandiose architectural ornament common to public buildings of that period. Since Shadowkill was a rich township, its library did not suffer the cheeseparing and overcrowding common to area libraries—a new modern wing in bland limestone angled off at the back, and the interior of the older building was beautifully kept.
"Excuse me, is there a public phone here?" Truth asked the librarian at the information desk.
The librarian pointed, and Truth detoured to an alcove where a bank of public phones stood. It took several minutes of juggling purse, wallet, and phone card before she managed to put her call through.
"Hi, this is Janine," an unfamiliar voice said brightly.
"I'm sorry; I must have dialed the wrong number," Truth said.
"Were you trying to reach Caroline Jourdemayne?" the voice asked carefully.
Truth felt a sinking sensation. "Yes."
"She's asleep right now," Janine said. Truth took a deep breath of relief. "If you want to call back after four, she should be awake then. I'm Janine Vaughan, Ms. Jourdemayne's aide."
"I'm Truth Jourdemayne," Truth said. "Is she—"
"Oh, you're her nieceV Janine said excitedly. Truth felt privately that nobody could possibly be that pleased about everything, but it was probably a defense mechanism against working with terminal patients all the time.
"How is she?" Truth asked.
"Oh, about the same," Janine said, her tone flattening a little. "She's still pretty alert. Dr. Vandemeyer doesn't think he'll have to move her to the hospital just yet."
"Well, that's good," Truth said. What else was there to say? "I'll call her back later."
"Shall I tell her you called?" Janine asked animatedly.
"No," Truth said. "I don't want her to worry when everything's fine. I'll call her back."
"After four," Janine said.
Truth hung up the phone and walked slowly back to the information desk.
Her first impulse had been to run to Aunt Caroline for information, but now she saw that she should think carefully before acting on impulse. Aunt Caroline was frail, dying, her mind possibly clouded by drugs. Truth would have to frame any questions she posed in a manner that wouldn't cause Aunt Caroline to be unnecessarily upset.
Whatever way that might be, Truth thought with a glint of black humor. What was the tactful way to open a discussion about the number and current location of Thorne Blackburn's bastard children?
"Excuse me," Truth said, returning to the pleasant woman at the desk. "Do you have a local history collection?"
A few minutes later Truth sat at a small table in a long room on the second floor of the library. Folders full of dusty newspaper clippings were piled high at her elbow.
"That's everything we have in the clipping files on Thorne Blackburn and Shadow's Gate. Don't mix up the files," local history librarian Laurel Villanova said.
"I won't," Truth promised. "There's just one more thing. Would you have anything on the . . ."—she cudgeled her memory for the name— "on the old Elkanah Scheidow patent grant?"
"Oh, you want the early history material." Laurel's brow cleared. "I think there are a couple of books in the noncirculating collection. Let me go check."
Laurel left. Truth paged through the file on Blackburn's life as reported by The Shadoivkill Times-Reporter, The Poughkeepsie Journal, The Albany Times, and other area papers. There wasn't anything much that she hadn't seen before: Blackburn had resided in Shadowkill for about eighteen months, during which time he'd fought constantly with the town council and had minor skirmishes with the Dutchess County Sheriff's Department. She put the wad of clippings dealing with her mother's death back into the folder unread. There might be more about Blackburn's children in them, but there would be time enough to face them later. After all, she had waited more than a quarter of a century already.
The second file, the one on Shadow's Gate itself, was more interesting. The earliest clippings were dark brown and flaked when she touched them. The paper had been called The Shadowkill Times Eagle then, and the earliest clipping in the folder dated back to 1934.
"Here you are," Laurel said, coming back with three books. "This should give you what you need."
"Thanks," Truth said, handing back the file on Blackburn. She settled down with the remaining folder and the books and began to read, taking notes as she did so.
A few hours later Truth looked up from her note-taking, working the cricks out of stiff shoulders and back. She'd found what, subconsciously, she'd hoped and expected to find, and wondered what she ought to do next.
The house called Shadow's Gate that she'd stayed in last night had been built, as she'd thought, out of an excess of High Victorian Gothicism in 1882—the same year, oddly enough, as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral which signified the end of the Wild West. It was the fourth building on the site, the first being Scheidow's own 1648 house and trading post, of which only engravings survived. Those pictures showed a typical seventeenth-century Dutch frontier home, built of mortar and local stone, small, low-roofed, and narrow-windowed.
The second house on the site of Scheidow's gehucht, or hamlet, had been built in 1714 and also survived only in pictures—the British had burned it to the ground during the Revolutionary War, sometime in the 1770s.
Of the building which must have occupied the site for some part of the next hundred years she found no record at all.
It would have been easy to dismiss the sources that spoke of the current building as the fourth house, not the third, save that there were so many of them—and if there really had been no house here for over a century, why did every source on the 1882 house speak of it as a rebuilding of Shadow's Gate? Surely the name would not have survived so long, attached to an empty field?
For that matter, when in this period had the name of the early town been Anglicized and transferred to the house? The Scheidows—variously spelled—had certainly remained in the area. In fact, the Schydows, Sky-does, Cheidows, Cheddowes, Shaddows, and Shatterses—names culled from the Shadowkill genealogy the librarian had brought, still filled several columns of the local phone book and continued as an active presence in local affairs.
Most of the information Truth had came from one book: A History of the Early Days of Scheidow's Kill, written by Matthew Cheddow, descendant, and privately published in 1923. Matthew had been living in Shadow's Gate at the time, and in the rambling fashion of amateur historians, had included a chapter on his house. She went back and looked at it again. Yes, there it was:
Incorporating what he could of the original foundation, the builder began work on this, the fourth house to grace Ancestor Scheidow's lovely rural coign, in 1878.
She scanned a few paragraphs more and found something else.
The underground stream, whose spring had proved so beneficial to early settlers but whose chthonic waters had proved so challenging to previous builders, was carefully reinforced with a sub-basement before building began once more on Elkanah Scheidow's original site. The spring was incorporated into the design of the house.
How? Truth wondered. She turned back to her other source: Hudson Colonial Days, With a Brief History of the Scheidow and von Rosenroth Patent Grants, and took another look at the original map of the area. Yes, there was a spring indicated, just about where the modern house stood. Each house had been built near—or over—that spring.
That meant that Shadow's Gate was built over an underground stream.
In some way that parapsychological researchers were only just beginning to understand, most psychic manifestations involved some aspect of magnetism—from dowsing, which seemed to relate to the ability to sense almost infinitesimal changes in the Earth's magnetic field, to psychokinetic—poltergeist—activity, which generated a magnetic field strong enough to stop watches and blank recording tape at the same time it flung chairs and dishes through the air. Dylan even claimed you could magnetize ghosts, although Truth wasn't quite sure how you could test a hypothesis like that.
But she did know that in a significant proportion of all cases of haunted houses, it was found that the houses had been built over underground streams, springs, or covered wells. There was something about water that either unlocked the forces of the Sixth Sense or drove people crazy. Truth wasn't sure which.
But she thought she had the answer to part of the riddle of Thorne Blackburn.
It wasn't that he was a great magician with the occult powers he claimed.
It was that he'd bought a haunted house.
It was not an hypothesis that would commend itself to everyone, Truth supposed, but parapsychology was her field, and she'd far rather spend her time trying to map paranormal activities than to—
Invoke undines, the elemental spirits of water?
Truth pushed the thought away. Maybe Julian had been doing just that—in Venus Afflicted, as she had reason to know, the first four of the ten rituals were called "Crowning the Elemental Kings"—but even if he had done that ritual it didn't mean that an actual Elemental had objectively gone and destroyed Mary Lindholm's house.
But it was awfully convenient, wasn't it? Because now you're going to have to ask Julian if you can accept his kind offer after all—and stay at Shadow's Gate.
That was ridiculous.
She didn't have to.
She wanted to.
Truth separated her notes from the books and clippings, and went to find the local history librarian.
Laurel Villanova was carefully paging through a back issue of the Times Eagle when Truth approached.
"Done already?" she asked.
"For today," Truth said. "I might want this material again later in the week, though."
"I'll keep it out for you, then," the librarian promised. "Is there anything else you'll need?"
"I'll let you know," Truth said. "I don't really know myself, yet."
"Well, if there's anything I can do," Laurel said, rising to let Truth out of the office.
Truth realized that she had only the foggiest idea of the time as she stood on the library steps. Though sunset was hours away yet, the air held the clear, water-glass promise of twilight. She stuffed the day's notes willy-nilly into her shoulder bag and headed for the car at a rapid pace, as eager to get back to Shadow's Gate as she had been to leave it earlier. Julian must think she'd fallen off the face of the earth.
She reclaimed her car without too much trouble—it was silly, really, to drive when the center of town was two miles, at most, from the house. She'd know better next time.
She drove in through the gatehouse—Gareth waved—and on up to the house. Parking the car next to a white Volvo station wagon and a black BMW she suspected of belonging to Julian, she locked her Saturn carefully before skipping up the steps to the house. On an impulse, she tried the door before ringing the bell, and found it unlocked. She stepped inside.
"Truth. A word with you, if I may?"
Michael. With the sound of his voice all the psychic weight of the house descended on her again, and the serenity that her afternoon in Shadowkill had lent Truth vanished in a seething rush of apprehension.
She turned around. Michael Archangel stood in the hall, grave and cool and formal as she had always seen him, but once again she had the quick fearful vision of a panther chained by lightnings.
"Certainly." What else could she say? "By the way, I hear you're a member of the Inquisition; turned any good thumbscrews lately?" He'd think she'd lost her mind.
"Why don't we go out to the garden?" Michael said.
He led her out a side door onto a tiny terrace tucked into a corner of the house. It had a bench, table, and chairs on it, and looked like a lovely place to linger when the weather was warmer, but the setting sun cast it in shadow now, and Truth shivered just a bit.
"It will be warmer in the sun," Michael promised, leading her down the steps.
Here, directly behind the house, something remained of the formal gardens that must have surrounded the fourth Shadow's Gate in its heyday. Flagged walkways were edged with rosebushes and flower beds settling now for their yearly sleep. To the right, across a perfect expanse of green now raked clear of the storm's detritus, the severe geometric shape of what Truth knew from her researches to be a labyrinth created of boxwood hedges formed a smooth, dark green wall. One of the paths led in that direction, and Michael followed it.
"You seem somewhat more reconciled to us than you did last night," Michael said.
"Do I?" said Truth. 7 suppose familiarity breeds contempt.
"Julian says that you are a scientist. A parapsychologist." Michael rolled the word around in his mouth as though he'd never heard it before.
"My specialty is statistical parapsychology; you could say I've specialized in learning to see what's there." And nothing else.
"Yet those who are the most rigorous in their examination of the merely physical world miss much: the beauty of a poem, the song of a lark—"
"If I can file the poem and record the lark I'll settle for not appreciating them," Truth said curtly. "My field is facts. How long have you known Julian?" she asked, moving to the attack.
"Oh, quite some time," Michael said easily. "He has accomplished a great deal in a very short time—and wishes to do more. He is a man of great power."
"Occult power, you mean?" Truth asked, fencing for a way to turn the question around to Michael.
"Why should I praise him according to the standards of a system in whose existence you refuse to believe?" Michael said, smiling.
"But in which you believe?" Truth asked.
Michael smiled. "If I said yes, you would discount everything else I have to say."
"Which is?" The question bordered on rudeness and Truth was sorry for it, but the last thing she wanted just now was another round of ritual-cloak-and-sacred-dagger.
"Often we find ourselves determined to know things when to know nothing would be the wiser and happier course—not only for ourselves, but for those around us," Michael began. "It is not that learning is, in and of itself, wrong, but—"
"But there are things that Man was not meant to know?" Truth shot back.
"Would you give a baby a loaded gun?" Michael said quietly. Truth was stung to silence by the image he'd presented, and Michael continued. "No. No one would. But a grown man may handle a gun safely, although the potential for abuse and sorrow is still enormous. If I tell you that there are things which exist, which have existed from the creation of the world, things that Man may someday wield, but which his wisdom is not yet great enough to bear—"
"I don't think you—or any other person—has a right to draw the line between things that can be studied and things that can't. There is nothing which cannot be studied."
Michael smiled. "There speaks the voice of Science."
They had reached the edge of the maze. Truth stopped, and looked back toward the house, but if anyone was watching them from its various windows she could not see them.
"I don't think that happiness is more important than knowledge. And I don't believe in magick," Truth said flatly.
"If you do not believe in magick—in the supernatural—how can you believe in evil?" Michael's voice came from behind her.
Shadow's Gate cast long slanting rays of darkness across the lawn. Truth took a deep breath and counted to ten before she spoke. How could a mere two miles' drive in her car make so much difference to how she felt? She'd be seeing ghosts and fairies next.
"I do not wish to disparage your beliefs," she said, turning to face Michael, "but in my book, the only evil in the world comes from what people do to other people and there isn't a damn thing supernatural about it. There is no such thing as magick—there are only natural laws that we don't yet fully understand."
"And if I told you that such a thing—magick—exists outside your laws?"
"Then—I'm sorry—but I would have to tell you to have a nice day. I don't share your beliefs."
"And so you will stay to learn that of which you would have been happier to remain in ignorance. For I tell you this and truly: If magick is evil, there is evil here. And sorrow."
Truth opened her mouth—and closed it, firmly. "I have to go now. I guess I'll see you at dinner, Michael?" she said with determined diplomacy.
"Of course," he said with grave courtesy.
She turned to go back to the house.
"And, Truth?"
She stopped.
"Have a nice day," Michael said without a trace of humor.
Truth reached the house minutes later in a state of simmering fury that her colleagues at the Bidney Institute had long since learned to recognize and walk softly around.
How dare he make fun of her? Lead her on, force her to listen to all sorts of stupid mystic psychobabble, spout cliches too tired even for "B" movies, and then, when she tried to be polite, twist her own words and use them to mock her! She would not be mocked—how dare he raise his eyes to such as she was. . . .
She lunged up the stairs and twisted savagely at the knob of the terrace door. It opened and she passed into the house, coming within a hair's breadth of slamming the door behind her.
He was going to be sorry. Was he trying to make her leave Shadow's Gate? She'd take out a long lease. Were there things Man was not meant to know? Lead her to them. So you shouldn't give a baby a loaded gun? She'd give it a bazooka. She'd—
