Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (39 page)

NEW YORK
, AUTUMN  1972

0! never say that I was false of heart, Though absence
seem'd my flame to qualify.
—
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 
          
NEW
YORK SEEMED TO GROW DARKER AND DIRTIER EVERY YEAR, COLIN MacLaren thought to
himself in resignation. He knew better than to ascribe that dour observation to
anything other than the passing of years; he was two years past the
half-century mark, the point at which any man must stop and consider his life.

 
          
For
most of his early life his inner sight had been dazzled by the enormity of the
battle in which the Light was engaged, but the passing of years had reminded
him that the generalship of that great struggle was not his, nor had it ever
truly been. Slowly he had learned to concentrate on those battles within the
reach of his hand. It was not his to build the cathedral, nor to tear it down;
only to repair what other hands had made, so that the hands to come after could
take up such work in their turn.

 
          
And
when he was not called to that Labor, Colin did his other work-small,
undramatic, and purely mundane striving to enlighten the great mass of people.

 
          
Selkie
Press was a small, independent publisher of occult books
—
teetering, like all such
presses, on the verge of bankruptcy. It was dedicated to collecting and
reprinting important material in the field of magick and the supernatural.
Under Colin's editorship, a number of classics of parapsychological research
had been brought back into print, as well as more esoteric items of interest to
a small yet dedicated readership.

           
Last year Selkie Press had reprinted
Margrave and Anstey's
The Natural History of the Poltergeist,
Taverner's
Ha'ants, Spooks, and Fetchmen,
and a number of extracts from a medieval
Spanish grimoire called
La Tesoraria
del
On.

 
          
In
Colin's opinion the grimoire was a thoroughly dangerous book, and he saw no
reason to make its potential available to the world at large. He'd edited the
press's version of
La Tesoraria
rigorously and without a single qualm.
There was a middle ground between censorship and utter irresponsibility, and
there was certain information which Colin would not freely dispense any more
than he would give a baby a loaded gun. Responsible stewardship was the first
commandment of his Lodge, and Colin kept the faith.

 
          
As
Thorne Blackburn had not.

 
          
Reflexively,
Colin put the old pain from him. Thorne was dead and the world had moved on,
much as if what had happened at Shadow's Gate had ended the morning of the
Aquarian Age in one fell stroke of night. These days, it seemed impossible that
anyone had ever seriously thought that they could reshape the material world
with magick.

 
          
The
hard brilliant light that was such a feature of a
New York
autumn gilded the brick
walls of the buildings across the back courtyard and turned the tiny scrap of
sky he could see a deep Egyptian blue. This time of year always made Colin
feel restless, as though he were late in setting out upon a journey.

 
          
Perhaps
he was.

 
          
Sighing,
Colin set the book he was reading
—
a biography of a pioneer in
the field of parapsychology that Selkie was thinking of reprinting
—
down on the desk in his tiny
back bedroom office. He missed the view from the top floor, but the first floor
had been the only apartment vacant when he'd decided to move back East, and
Colin had hated the thought of evicting a tenant for nothing more than a whim.
And the first-floor apartment had its compensations
—
there was a fireplace in the
living room.

 
          
He
gave the book a farewell pat and dismissed it from his mind. He had a couple of
weeks before his report on it was due to Alan, and another engagement for this
evening.

 
          
The
Sorcery Shoppe was located in the east Thirties, just off
Sixth Avenue
(like all true New Yorkers,
Colin had never been able to adjust to its rechris-tening as the Avenue of the
Americas
, even after thirty years).
The brisk walk uptown from his apartment reminded him of how much he still
loved the city, despite its many flaws. The great occultist Dion Fortune had
once written that in the major population centers, one could see Civilization
as it would be twenty years in the future.

 
          
If
that were so, then the future was a place in which only the strong would
survive.
New York
's population had nearly
doubled since the fifties; the grace notes to daily living that cities such as
San Francisco
still retained were being
hammered out of
Baghdad
on the
Hudson
beneath the heavy hand of
progress. Colin tried to imagine the streets around him in another twenty
years' time and could not manage it.
Our vision always fails in the homely
things, not the great.
His first teacher had told him that.

 
          
The
Shoppe stood out among its neighbors, a bright peacock among a flock of dingy
commercial establishments. It was that rarest of beasts, a store catering to
the occult and New Age that predated the Age of Aquarius. While its stock
consisted primarily of books
—
many of them Selkie Press titles
—
it also sold herbs, candles,
and other oddments.

 
          
The
building in which the Sorcery Shoppe was housed was over a century old and had
begun its life, long ago, as a pharmacy and soda fountain. All that remained
from that long-ago incarnation was the pressed tin ceiling (now painted black),
the parquet marble floor, and the long mirror that filled all one side of the
shop. Now greenish and corroded with age, the mirror served as a backdrop to
jar-filled shelves of dried herbs, causing the unwary to startle when they
caught a glimpse of themselves in the ravaged mirror beyond the jars. The
storefront was painted bright red and dotted with black-and-yellow cabalistic
symbols, and a black banner with silver letters hanging from a flagpole over
the door proclaimed the shop's name.

 
          
As
Colin approached, he could see that the display window was, as always, draped
in black velvet, and bestrewn with the most lurid of the Sorcery Shoppe's
merchandise: illuminated crystal balls, star-tipped Wizard Wands, dried bats,
human skulls, and other lurid
Hollywood
paraphernalia.

 
          
As
its name suggested, the Sorcery Shoppe happily catered to the more sensational
aspects of magick, serving as the crossroads for most of
Manhattan
's esoteric community no
matter their Path or inclination, but alongside its amulets and voodoo-doll
kits, it carried serious scholarly books impossible to find elsewhere, and
hosted lectures given by authorities in their various fields. Colin himself had
lectured here on a number of occasions.

 
          
Today,
however, he had not come to lecture, but rather to hear a lecture given by John
Cannon, a notorious popularizer of the occult in the Hans Holtzer vein.
Unfortunately, there was a certain amount of meat to Cannons books
—
sound research and extensive
quotations from public domain sources
—
but Cannon's books, for all
the facts they contained, were not meant to teach. They were meant to entertain
and titillate, producing in their readers the same sort of pleasurable fear
that a child experienced in walking past a "haunted" house.

 
          
Tonight,
the subject was Black Witchcraft. John Cannon claimed to have firsthand
knowledge of an operating black coven.

 
          
Colin
knew that most self-styled witches
—
or, as they preferred to be
known these days,
Wiccans
—
practiced a harmless form of Nature-worship established by
the Englishman Gerald B. Gardner. Even though their practices had more ties to
the Hashbury than to Hell, their attempts to "reclaim" their
traditional designations of "witch" and "coven" only led to
them becoming confused by the public with LaVey-style Satanism (which also used
these terms for its practices).

 
          
Fortunately,
most of the modern "White" Witches that Colin had met were quiet,
reserved, and decidedly publicity-shy, so that public conflicts rarely arose.
Still, it was important to draw the distinction between White and Black
Witchcraft in the public mind, lest innocent people be harmed.

 
          
As
Colin entered the shop, the usual reek assaulted his nose, the mingled scents
of frankincense and dust and pot that made up the place's distinctive
fragrance. He stopped at the register and bought a ticket to the lecture. There
was a large bulletin board beside the cash register; Colin stopped to glance
over the postings. Most of them, as usual, were the typical farrago of ads by
astrologers and self-proclaimed descendants of recently founded ancient
priesthoods, but one or two items were of interest.

 
          
In
addition to the large color poster advertising tonight's speaker
—
a glossy full-color n x 17
poster with a studio portrait of the speaker, who looked more like an insurance
agent than an intrepid explorer of the dark underbelly of magick
—
there were two that caught
his interest. One was silkscreened in shades of green and purple, with stars
and unicorns and a Moon-crowned Goddess of suspiciously Art Nouveau aspect. Its
design owed more than a little to the acid art he was familiar with from the
Bay Area, and seemed to be proclaiming the formation of the Earthrite Temple of
Pagan Witchcraft, sponsored by Coven Tree.

 
          
Colin
smiled at the gentle play on words. He knew some of the members of Coven Tree;
they were harmless dilettantes, interested in feminism and spiritual
self-expression, though some of those attracted to them might not be. He made a
note to keep a weather eye on them and turned to the other.

 
          
In
comparison to the first, it was crude; a black-and-white Xerox of a press-typed
original. It announced that applications were being taken for a study group on
the Blackburn Work. Serious inquiries only, and a familiarity with the Work was
essential, the notice said. The contact address was a post office box in
Queens
.

 
          
Colin
gazed at it, frowning, his mind thousands of miles away as he tucked his ticket
into his vest pocket.

 
          
There'd
been a flurry of interest in Thorne Blackburn just after the Shadow's Gate
mess;
Time
had done a cover story on his disappearance and Katherine
Jourdemayne's death. Though no trace of his body had been found in three years
of searching, Colin had no doubt that Thorne was dead. Apparently death had
catapulted him into some strange American immortality usually reserved for dead
rock stars, at least judging by this advertisement.