Ghostlight by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online Page B

Man, Myth, and Magic had little more. When she looked at her notes after a week’s hard work, they were laughably cryptic.
    Thorne Blackburn, probably born circa 1939, birthplace unknown—possibly England—family unknown, early life unknown. First surfaced in New Orleans in the late 1950s, where he was doing fake voodoo rituals for the tourists—a phase of his career that hadn’t lasted long—and claiming to be the Comté de Cagliostro, an eighteenth-century French con artist who’d claimed to be a thousand years old. Claims notwithstanding, Thorne had been somewhere around thirty when he died—Dylan was right; he’d be in his sixties if he were alive today.
    Already well established as an occultist when he resurfaced in San Francisco in the early 1960s, Blackburn had claimed affiliation both to the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Golden Dawn. He’d made a big splash with his lectures, public rituals, and the publication of what they, in those innocent days, had called an “underground newspaper”—dedicated to Blackburn’s cult, of course, and his bizarre New Age theories.
    And that was that. There the story of Blackburn’s life—and death—ended.
    Her library request for newspaper stories on Blackburn had netted Truth a folder full of copies of microfilmed newspaper stories, none of them of much particular use beyond providing the name of the lawyer. Most of them focused on the April 1969 disappearance. Katherine Jourdemayne’s death was listed as “suspected drug overdose.” Police had searched for Thorne but he’d never been found; other members of the Circle had been held for a while and then released. There had been no arrests.

    It was a trail a quarter of a century cold, but maybe she could unriddle it—if she visited Shadow’s Gate.
    Truth didn’t understand where the conviction had come from that her answers were there—the estate was deserted, after all, left to rot while the miles of red tape surrounding it and its gone-but-not-definitely-dead owner reeled onward like a legal battle in a Dickens novel. If not for that, Shadow’s Gate and its hundred-acre wood would have been sold off years ago, Truth assumed. But she had to go there.
    It had seemed simpler back at the Institute. Truth stared out her car’s windshield in despair, at what looked like just another Dutchess Country back road. She’d been driving all morning, and by now she was nearly ready to admit she was lost.
    Maybe Shadow’s Gate didn’t really exist.
    Of course it does , she rebuked herself mentally. The Bed-and-Breakfast in nearby Shadowkill, where she’d made reservations for tonight’s lodging, was certainly real enough to take Visa. Truth pulled off the road at a convenient wide spot and inspected her Dutchess County map again. Shadowkill had to be around here somewhere. It wasn’t just a figment of a cartographer’s imagination.
    Laboriously, Truth located Shadowkill on the map and then (glancing up at the road sign to make sure of her facts) State Road 43. They were about an inch apart at the best of times, and did not cross as her directions assured her they should.
    Oh, I see. I should have turned back there somewhere, onto County 13. Lucky Thirteen. How appropriate.
    It was just a good thing, Truth reflected to herself, that she wasn’t a superstitious person.
    But even a superstitious person would have been disarmed by the sight of the little town of Shadowkill, which Truth finally reached some forty minutes later.

    Shadowkill was an archetypal Hudson River town, with rambling Victorian mansions grouped around a picture-perfect town park. There was a large war memorial in the center of the traffic circle, and a Main Street lined with antique stores and a number of cunning, trendy little shops, marking Shadowkill as one of the hamlets in “Sleepy Hollow Country” that obtained most of its