Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (87 page)

 
          
"Yeah,
maybe," Grey said, unconvinced. "But at least your generation
worried
about its problems. Nobody cares about much of anything today except
getting by. At least in the sixties everyone knew where the boundaries
were."

 
          
"Even
if they weren't really there," Colin said. "Come on, Grey-
—
there's no use putting it
off much longer. The papers will still be there waiting for us, no matter what
happens to the world."

 
          
They
went inside to Colin's office, and for several hours the conversation was
entirely about absent correspondents, missing letters, and all the exoteric
paraphernalia of a life spent in exploration of the Unseen World. Grey had the
training and background to make the work easy, knowing from his own experience
what material could go to public collections, what could be donated but must
still be restricted, and what should best be destroyed in the absence of a
disciple to whom Colin could entrust it.

           
"That's enough for today,"
Colin said firmly as the light began to fail. "And Winter will have my
head if I tire you out." He sat back on the couch, sighing.

 
          
Grey
got up and stretched, turning on the lights, and looked down at the day's work.

 
          
"Now
this deserves a special glass case at the institute," Grey said, picking
up the paperweight Alison had given Colin so long ago. " 'Whosoever draws
this sword is rightwise king of all
England
' and all that." He
slipped the little silver letter opener from its place in the anvil and
brandished it a moment before sliding it back and placing the paperweight on
the windowsill.

 
          
"Not
me, though. I'm busy enough as it is. In fact, I meant to tell you, I'm going
to have to miss next week," Grey said. "Circle of Fire's getting
ready for Samhain; we're going to throw a big whoop-de-do with a bunch of the
other Circles, and there's so much work to get done. Permits, licenses, all
that kind of thing."

 
          
"I
hope you have better luck with them than Thorne ever did," Colin answered,
and for the first time in many years, the old memories did not bring pain.

 
          
Grey
only laughed.

 
          
Grey
had been gone less than ten minutes when the phone rang. Colin picked it up,
cutting the answering machine off in midmessage; it was probably just Winter
calling, wondering where her husband was.

 
          
"Hello?"

 
          
"Colin?
It's Dylan."

 
          
"Dylan,"
Colin said, glancing at the clock on the sill next to Alison's paperweight.
Five
o'clock
—
that meant
eight P.M.
back in
New York
; Dylan should be at home.
"What can I do for you?"

 
          
"Oh,
nothing really," Dylan said, so off-handedly that Colin became instantly
alert. "I was just . . . you remember Rowan Moorcock, don't you?"

 
          
Yes,
he remembered Rowan. Claire's cousin had been at Truth's wedding. She'd changed
since Colin had first met her, and now seemed to represent the worst of the
"bubble-gum occultism" that had come out of the Aquarian Age: the
frivolous, superficial approach to the ancient mysteries that Grey had been
bemoaning earlier.

 
          
"Yes
. . ." Colin said slowly. "Is something wrong?"

 
          
"Yes.
No. That is, I'm not really certain myself," Dylan said slowly.

 
          
"That
seems to just about cover everything," Colin said, the cold certainty of
trouble growing in his stomach with every word Dylan spoke. "But I'm sure
you didn't call at this hour just to discuss one of your students." Surely
Rowan would have finished at Taghkanic by now? But it was hard to tell with
postgraduate studies.

 
          
"Well,
Rowan's doing her doctoral work here . . ." Dylan said. His very
unwillingness to put his fears into words somehow made them seem all the more
real. "And with one thing and another, I don't see as much of her now as I
used to. I've been pretty busy this summer, what with working on that mess up
at Frosthythe and getting Truth off to
England
to meet the Thornes, and I
suppose I just lost track of what she was doing. Rowan, I mean."

 
          
Colin
waited, half-expecting Dylan to simply hang up; he sounded that much like a man
distracted past all sense.

 
          
"She's
disappeared," Dylan finally said. "I don't know where she is and I
think she's in over her head."

 
          
"You've
mentioned this to her father?" Colin asked.

 
          
"What
could I do except worry him?" Dylan demanded in frustrated tones.
"She hasn't been back to her apartment in a month, she hasn't checked her
e-mail . . . what am I supposed to do, Colin?"

 
          
"You
could start," Colin said, as quietly as possible, "with telling me
why you've called me instead of the police."

 
          
There
was a long silence at the other end of the line.

 
          
"Because
they won't understand," Dylan said, an impatience like anger in his voice.
"I know she's in trouble, but there's no way I could explain it to someone
who ..."

 
          
There
was another pause; Colin heard Dylan sigh.

 
          
"I'd
hoped ... I hope you can tell me where to start looking," he said.
"I'm not sure where to begin. Have you ever heard of something called the
Thule Group?"

 
          
The
room grew dim as Dylan spoke. "It was supposed to be a historical research
project. In the simplest terms, the Thule Group's supposed to be a German
secret society founded in the early twentieth century by Guido von List;
Thule
is supposed to be the
ancient German homeland, and all that. Under Lanz von Liebenfels, von List's
successor, there's some evidence that the Thule Group
—
or
Armanenschaft,
as
a number of scholars use the terms almost interchangeably
—
formed a second order which
became the Brownshirts who were instrumental in Hitler's rise to power.

 
          
"After
the war, of course, all sorts of rumors grew up around it, including the urban
folklore that Hitler had himself been a member of one of the Thule Lodges, and
that the entire Holocaust had been planned and performed under orders from his
occult superiors. Of course, if it ever had existed, it must have been
destroyed by Hitler's own purges of the occult Lodges in the thirties and
forties," Dylan said.

 
          
"I
think you know that isn't true, Dylan," Colin said, rousing himself to
speech with an effort. There was no point in letting Dylan go on telling him
things he already knew far too well out of sheer nerves. "Whatever the
Thule Group originally was, it later became a part of the
Ahnenerfte,
and
it survived the fall of
Berlin
essentially intact, just as
so much of the Nazi power structure did."

 
          
Through
the connection Colin could almost hear the disbelief, the resistance to what
he said.

 
          
"That's
over fifty years ago. Even if some of them survived, surely they simply
disbanded. What was there left for them to work for? They'd lost the war.
..."

 
          
"Sometimes
I wonder if that war ever really ended," Colin said, half to himself.
"Believe me, Dylan: the Lodge
—
the original Lodge, the one
directly descended from the one List founded
—
survives today. And it's
still fighting for the goals of the Third Reich. Now tell me
—
how is Rowan involved?"

 
          
"Her
dissertation topic was
'The Evolution of Trance Mediumship as an Instrument
of Nazi Theocracy.'"
Dylan took a deep breath, as if wondering how
best to go on.

 
          
Colin
waited, gripping the phone tightly, as if he thought it might try to get away.

 
          
"Well,
almost immediately she turned up the contemporary would-be Thulists
—
the groups that date back to
the sixties and later
—
the mystical branch of the Klan; various kinds of back-engineered
neo-Nazi nonsense. And I told her to stay completely away from them. They're
nothing but bad news
—
and more to the point for Rowan's purposes, they're
neo-Nazi,
and have nothing to do with the Third Reich. . . ."

 
          
Get
on with it,
Colin urged mentally, but he could sense that there was information
that Dylan could simply not bring himself to reveal over the phone.

 
          
"So
you told her to drop it. And naturally she did what you said," Colin said
neutrally.

 
          
But
if she had, why would you have called me?

 
          
Dylan
met him at the small local airport. The drive back to
Glastonbury
passed in uncharacteristic
silence; Colin was occupied with his own thoughts. It was impossible to
reconcile the sassy, bouncy, young woman he'd seen at Dylan's wedding last year
with someone motivated and willing to go into battle against monsters whose
supposed defeat lay half a century in her past.

 
          
If,
in fact, that had been what she was doing. If she'd taken her work seriously
enough to know how dangerous
—
how real
—
those monsters could be.

 
          
Colin
prayed that she understood the stakes of the game she'd been playing. For her
own sake.

 
          
The
apartment was located over a shop in downtown
Glastonbury
, only a block or two away
from Inquire Within. While he was opening the door, Dylan explained
—
again
—
that Rowan had left her keys
with a student named Val Graves whom she'd hired to look after her plants and
bring in her mail. Rowan had paid Val for three months
—
in advance.

 
          
So
she intended to disappear. Is that a good sign? I hope to Heaven it is.

 
          
Colin
looked around the apartment, hoping to find some clue that Dylan had missed. It
was a typical student apartment, though Rowan had long since moved out of
student housing; the only item that looked as if it had been bought new was the
stereo.

 
          
The
uncurtained window overlooking the street was filled with plants; some hanging,
some on shelves. All looked lush and cared-for. Framed posters covered the
walls
—
most
of them in the wearily realistic style of modern fantasy art: dragons,
knights, tough-looking young women in tattoos and leather. There was a bowlful
of multisided dice on the bookcase next to the stereo; Rowan Moorcock, it
appeared, was an aficionado of the dice-driven role-playing games that had
become most people's modern metaphor for magick and the Unseen World.

 
          
Despite
the messy disorder of the living room, it did not seem to have been searched.
They
haven't backtracked her here, then,
Colin thought.
Or perhaps they
didn't need to.

 
          
Dylan
was leafing through the pile of unopened mail on the corner of the couch,
oblivious to Colin.