Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (61 page)

 
          
"It's
a preferred make-out spot, of course, because the park rangers don't patrol it
and the sheriffs deputies don't get up there much either, so I hear. Why?"

 
          
Because
they all looked so guilty. . . .

 
          
"I'm
wondering if you've heard anything 'odd' about it. Odd in our particular line,
of course," Colin said.

 
          
He
picked up one of the Tarot decks piled on the counter beside the register in
hopes of tempting patrons and turned it over in his hands. Pride had always
been his besetting sin, and he'd been proud of the communion he'd forged with
his students. Knowledge of that pride vexed him nearly as much as worry about
what these students had gotten up to.

 
          
"Not
about
Nuclear
Lake
in particular,
really," Claire answered thoughtfully. "The local coven goes up
there, I think. Going down to the river's too dangerous and probably too public
for them, and the lake is, after all, reputed to be a place of power,"
Claire finished dryly, picking up Monsignor. She gestured at her bookshelves
with a free hand.

 
          
"I'm
not an expert, but my stock is. There isn't much folklore about
Amsterdam
County
other than the Grey Angels
—
and you'll find them up in
Columbia
and down in Dutchess as
well
—
and
I don't think I've seen anything at all about
Nuclear
Lake
."

 
          
Colin
frowned. Students played pranks and pushed the rules
—
those things had been true
even when Colin was a student. Drugs, illegal as ever, were still a part of
college life, as were freewheeling sex, bootlegged music tapes, and ghost-written
term papers. But Colin couldn't believe that those kids would have looked so
guilty
about any of those things, Grey particularly.

 
          
And
around me of all people!
Colin thought, amused at how much the notion
pricked his vanity.

 
          
"You're
thinking again," Claire accused him. She went through the curtain to get
her keys, and Poltergeist appeared as if by magic, trotting toward the sound
and miaouing. She knew that the jingle of keys led to the sound of the
can-opener, when Claire took the cats upstairs for the night.

 
          
The
space that Claire had rented for Inquire Within was actually almost square, but
a brick wall down the center of the space divided it nearly in half. The
landlord had been willing to knock it down, but Claire had chosen to keep it, adding
a second drywall partition that sectioned the left side of the store off into
two storage rooms, one of which was also used for discussion groups. Though
Claire sold herbs, she could not bear the thought of her stock being tampered
with or contaminated in any way, and so kept it under lock and key.

 
          
"Ready?"
Claire asked.

 
          
"So
tell me," Claire said later. "What are you worried about Grey getting
up to? Group sex? Orgies? Satanic rites?"

           
Colin stared down into an
after-dinner cup of coffee, as though he were a psychic and could see answers
there.

 
          
"I
wish I knew. The five of them are doing
something
—
and try as I might, I can't
imagine what."

 
          
"Well,
no one's ever accused you of a lack of imagination before," Claire
observed, setting the cake plate down on the table. "Maybe it's just too
much imagination this time. Why don't you ask him?"

 
          
"Ask
him what?" Colin sighed. "I don't even know how to frame the question.
If it was something Grey wanted me to know about
—
or didn't care if I knew
—
he would have told me. Lord
knows he's told me about enough other things: rehanging the Lookerman portrait
from the library, tampering with the key sheet on the physics exam, putting the
brandy in the coffee urn. ..."

 
          
"Not
to mention smoking the Christian Prayer Fellowship out of the Student Union
with asafetida and petitioning for permission to found
Students for
Satan,"
Claire said, "although
that
was perfectly legal,
just silly. Colin, I think you're worrying too much. But if you like, I'll go
up to
Nuclear
Lake
and take a look
around."

 
          
Colin
sighed again. He knew what Claire was offering, and what they both worried
about
—
that
Grey's irrepressible curiosity would lead him down the same dark path that
Simon Anstey seemed to be following. If Grey was meddling in Black Magick,
Claire's Gift would pick that up immediately.

 
          
"It
feels too much like spying," Colin said, "but the real reason I'm
going to turn you down is that if it isn't outright Ungodliness
—
or even something mundane,
like selling drugs
—
"

 
          
"Not
Grey!" Claire protested.

 
          
"Oh,
I don't mean he's the local pusher, but grass is illegal, too, even if most of
the students smoke it. It comes from somewhere, and if that's what he's up to
you'd have no way of telling. And I think it's probably something like that;
drugs are one of the Paths to Power, after all."

 
          
"But
you don't encourage that at all, Colin; it's dangerous. And Grey looks up to
you. He'd do what you said."

 
          
"Oh,
I suppose that generally he thinks I know what I'm talking about, which is more
than he grants most of his professors. But as for blind obedience ..."

 
          
"No,"
both of them agreed in chorus.

 
          
"I'll
just go up and take a look around myself," Colin said. "If I don't
find anything, probably there isn't anything to find, and I can just forget the
whole thing."

 
          
He
prayed he could forget the whole thing.

 
          
Though
the poets would have it otherwise, February, not April, was the crudest month
in
Amsterdam
County
. The day dedicated to the
little God of Love
—
later a Catholic saint
—
was bitterly cold, and a
sudden heavy snowfall a few days before had made travel a difficult
proposition. The eight inches of snow that had fallen was powdery and dunelike
due to the still-bitter cold, but where the plows had shifted it the snow had
melted and refrozen itself into crusty knolls that formed impassable barriers
to traffic. And on the un-plowed roads, a shifting coat of snow concealed an
inch or two of pack ice.

 
          
The
weather was probably the reason that Colin had chosen today for his expedition
to
Nuclear
Lake
—
that, and the fact that the
weekend gave him a whole free day. It wasn't likely that he'd be disturbed.
Only a fool would try these back roads in a car, but Colin had possessed the
foresight to borrow a friend's Range Rover for his expedition, and the 4WD
vehicle took the snowbound track in its stride.

 
          
Soon
the lake
—
its snow-covered, frozen surface only discernible by the
cattail growth that rimmed it
—
was in sight, with the building beyond it. Colin pulled up
in a place he guessed to have once been the parking lot and got out.

 
          
The
heavy snow deadened even the sounds that he would normally have heard this far
out in the country, save for the faint tinkling of ice-bound tree branches and
the occasional hiss as a snowmass slid to the ground. The wind off the river
lifted veils of snow from the ground and carried them for a few feet before
they dropped. The sky was a pale blue, and reflection from the snow washed out
all the colors around him, giving the world an ethereality that contributed to
the dreamlike quality of the moment.

 
          
The
front door of the building opened easily to one of Colin's skeleton keys, and a
quick search of the building revealed nothing more nefarious than a few
discarded wine bottles and a mattress someone had dragged into a corner of one
of the offices for the obvious purpose.

 
          
But
Colin knew there was more than this to the place, and when he found the
stairway leading down into the basement he wasn't surprised.

 
          
There
was enough light from the windows along the south wall to make the contents of
the room dimly visible in the afternoon light, though Colin was glad enough
that he'd thought to bring a flashlight. The basement was all one large room,
thirty feet by about twice that. The sinks along the windowed wall and the complicated
sockets drilled into the cinderblock above them were indication that this had
once been some kind of laboratory, but all the original furniture had been long
since removed. Its current tenants had put up a set of brick-and-board
bookcases in the corner, and brought down a couple of footlockers, a table, and
some folding chairs.

 
          
In
contrast to the rooms above, this space was painstakingly clean. The
cement-slab floor had been scrubbed until it shone, then painted with a complex
multicolored design that covered an area almost twenty feet across. Three tall
jar-candles were set at the points of a triangle just inside the outer rim,
which had nine candles spaced evenly around it. There was a thirteenth candle
set between the inner and outer rings just at the foot of the stairs: cardinal
North.

 
          
Colin
stared down at it, the hackles on the back of his neck rising. Somehow he
wasn't surprised at what he found when he got there. On some level he'd been
expecting it.

 
          
The
circle-within-a-circle was common to most of the forms of magick that he knew,
but the elaborate asymmetrical figure within it was nothing he knew.
Reflexively, he looked over his shoulder, knowing what he would find.

           
On the wall behind him another
symbol was painted. The black paint had run slightly, the drips giving the
glyph the look of something in motion.

 
          
In
the north . . . the North Gate. The gate through which the members of the Circle
send their spirits to the Overlight.

 
          
Somehow
Colin had hoped that the Aquarian Frontier would lose its fascination with
Thorne Blackburn and his works, but it never had. In the thirteen years since
Thome's death in 1969, those attracted to the tainted exploitive wellspring of
the Blackburn Work had been a steady
—
and slowly increasing
—
number. More books had been
written on the Work since his death than Thorne could have imagined in his
wildest dreams, their writers enchanted by the black romance of a magickal
system which permitted its practitioners to use people for their own ends as if
they were cattle ... or fodder.

 
          
But
the end did not
—
could never
—
sanctify the means. That was why the Light proscribed such
interference in the lives and destinies of the Unawakened. Colin wondered how
many of Thorne's postmortem followers had paid the same price that Thorne and
the Circle of Truth had for their reckless disregard of the ancient Laws
—
Laws as easy to disregard as
those of the physical world, and just as unforgiving.

 
          
Colin
turned his back to the North Gate and took a step forward, until his feet
nearly touched the edge of the outer ring. He studied the design beneath his
feet
—
the
crude attempt to duplicate, using color, what was described in the books as
seven Gates, laid one on top of the next, first to last. The last time he'd
seen these shapes they'd been silver, not paint.
And two people were dead,
and the rest irredeemably scarred. I will never forgive you for that, Thorne
—
never.