Ghostlight by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online Page A

be any different?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Truth had to admit. “But at least I’ll have the whole truth.” Suddenly she felt the need to convince him that what she was doing was right—and not just a petty act of vengeance. “If I wait too much longer, Dyl, the primary sources—the people who knew him—will all be dead.”
    â€œIf he were alive today he’d be in his sixties,” Dylan agreed. “But where are you going to start? Out in California? England?”
    â€œOh, no,” Truth said. “I’m starting closer to home than that. I’m starting where it all really began—or ended.” She took a deep breath and said the words: “I’m going to Shadow’s Gate.”

CHAPTER THREE
    THE CIRCLE OF TRUTH
    Truth, poor child, was nobody’s daughter
She took off her clothes and jumped in the water
    â€”DOROTHY L. SAYERS
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    IT WAS THE SECOND WEEK IN OCTOBER; PEAK SEASON for the leaf color in the Hudson Valley. Oaks, maples, birch, and poplars all turned their separate spectra of amber and gold against a sky so blue it hurt the eyes. And Truth was bound for Shadow’s Gate.
    It had been mildly surprising to discover that Blackburn had not been responsible for the quintessentially Gothic name of his last residence, nor had he fictionalized the name of the nearby town in his published essays. Shadowkill was a real place, the stream from which it took its name having been named by Dutch homesteader Elkanah Scheidow in 1641: Scheidow’s Kill— kill being the perfectly ordinary Dutch word for “stream,” appearing in Hudson Valley place-names from Peekskill to Plattekill.
    When English settlers displaced the Dutch in this area, Scheidow’s Kill became Anglicized to Shadowkill and became the name of the new English town,
and  Scheidowgehucht —“Scheidow’s Hamlet”—became Shadow’s Gate, a name now attached only to the estate outside the little village. Thus a spooky and theatrical taxonomy dissolved under the press of a little research into something perfectly ordinary and nonfrightening.
    And damned elusive.
    She’d gotten the name of the attorneys handling Blackburn’s estate—and therefore the property—from the newspaper stories that covered his 1969 disappearance, but her letters and phone calls to them asking for help and information—and permission to visit the house—had gone unanswered. Still, Truth didn’t think there would be any problem with just climbing over the fence and taking a walk around. And as Blackburn’s daughter, even if illegitimate, she might be said to have some claim on the place.
    The thought disturbed her. She didn’t want anything from Blackburn, not his arcane book, not his ritual jewelry, not his—what was the phrase one of her nutcase correspondents had used? Oh, yes—not his mantle of mystic authority. Truth snorted derisively at the memory.
    But she did want to see the house. She remembered nothing of the time she’d spent at Shadow’s Gate; the memories of her earliest childhood. Perhaps there was something she could reclaim for herself in this journey: her history.
    Â 
    Almost a month had gone by while she applied for and received the leave of absence from the Institute, followed by the distasteful business of actually trying to locate some hard biographical information on Thorne Blackburn. She had spoken to Aunt Caroline on the phone a couple of times, but Aunt Caroline had not mentioned Thorne Blackburn again, or the legacy, and for that Truth was grateful.
    While she’d waited for her leave to be approved, Truth collected and reviewed the material on Blackburn that
she’d read when she first became aware of him, and found it was even scantier than she’d thought. There had only been the briefest of mentions in Colin Wilson’s The Occult, and Richard Cavendish’s