Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 Page 13

  Blackburn's response—the letter was handwritten in an exquisite crabbed script, tiny and nearly impossible to read—was both enthusiastic and technical, and from certain references Blackburn made, Colin was reasonably sure that Simon had been right in assuming that the man had received at least some training. If Colin had replied to the letter, he'd kept no copy of the response, and wondered why he'd kept the letter at all.

  Stuck to Blackburn's letter was another one. Colin glanced at the letterhead—it was from Nathaniel Atheling, dated the following year.

  Nathaniel had left the hurly-burly of Manhattan for a private clinic somewhere in Massachusetts. He and Colin corresponded erratically, but the purpose of this particular letter was a business one. Nathaniel was letting Colin know, in his position as Exoteric Head of the Order in America, that one Douglas Thorne Blackburn, who had achieved the Sublime Grade of Master of the Temple at the Avalon Lodge in England, was not to be received or acknowledged as such by any of his brethren.

  Why? Colin crumpled both of the letters together and began tearing them into strips. He had no business keeping a copy of such correspondence in the first place—he must have meant to respond to Nathaniel's letter and forgotten about it.

  Or chosen not to. What was there to say, after all, unless he chose to take the unknown young man's part? If Blackburn had protested his expulsion from the Order, his protest had not succeeded.

  Colin frowned, revising his mental picture of Thorne Blackburn from that of a frivolous Pied Piper close to Jonathan's age to one of a dark and brooding Svengali. Master of the Temple was not the highest grade it was possible to attain, but it was one which took years of study to reach. He dropped the shreds of paper into the wastebasket and sat back down at his desk, brooding.

  "Colin?" Claire stood in the doorway. "What's wrong? I feel . . ."

  "A bad mood and some bad news," Colin told her, banishing both with a directed effort of will. "Claire. Come in. It's good to see you."

  Claire Moffatt stepped into Colin's office. She was wearing a neat pantsuit in sage green, and her fringed suede shoulder bag was large enough to contain enough items to meet most of life's emergencies. Her blond hair was short and neat in a fashionable helmet cut, and—as always—she wore very little makeup.

  "I stuffed all my bags in the trunk," she said, smiling. "It's too nice a day to be lumbered with bundles. But tell me what's happened. You look pretty blue. It isn't Jonathan, is it?"

  Fortunately, Colin was long used to the unnerving accuracy of Claire's hunches.

  "As a matter of fact, yes. He's dropping out of school. It seems he's found a guru and decided to hand over his mind and his money." Colin couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice. "Someone named Thorne Blackburn."

  "Now there's a coincidence," Claire said, her voice neutral. "You remember Debbie Winwood? I went to school with her. We'd lost touch, but about six months ago she turned up again. She's living with Blackburn over in San Francisco."

  "Good lord," Colin said inadequately. "Is he a friend of yours, Claire? I have to admit I haven't heard much that's good about him."

  He thought about the letter he'd received from Nathaniel Atheling. While it tarnished Blackburn's reputation further, it really wasn't something he could share with Claire. Despite their closeness, his oaths bound him still, just as they would with any other person not of his Lodge.

  Claire shrugged. "He's pretty . . . extreme, isn't he? But come on, let's go to lunch. I'm starved."

  Telegraph Avenue in June seemed a mirror twin of its counterpart in San Francisco, but the experienced eye could discern differences between the two, though the crowds of children thronging the streets seemed identically dressed and the same scents of incense and patchouli hung in the air.

  But in San Francisco the emphasis was on "feeding one's head" and "tune in—turn on—drop out"; while here in Berkeley the emphasis was on social change, from the SDS to the Black Panthers to people calling for a moratorium on the war.

  Despite the fact that he shared many of their views, Colin distrusted the young firebrands. Political activism could quickly turn to the sort of violence that inevitably paved the way for a fascist state, as history had all too often shown in recent years. Colin found himself walking past the banners and petitions as tense as if he watched a jumper balancing on a window ledge a dozen stories above the street. The country stood at a crossroads of history— in which direction would Fate compel it?

  Claire's choice of restaurant was one of the new ones tucked into a corner of an old building in what had until a few months ago been a run-down urban area. The words "It's A Beautiful Day" were painted on the window in an elaborate psychedelic lettering that Colin found almost impossible to read, and surrounded by painted symbols from all the world's religions.

  But inside, the restaurant was bright and clean—if covered with posters for political rallies and rock concerts—and offered a menu of plain, old-fashioned standards, with some exotic additions like couscous and bean sprouts. The smell of baking bread came from behind the counter. Salvaged stained-glass windows hanging from the ceiling splintered the bright summer sunlight into a patchwork of rainbow hues.

  "Say what you will about the decor," Claire said cheerfully, "the place is cheap, and two salaries don't seem to go any farther than one these days."

  "How's Peter?" Colin asked on cue.

  Claire shrugged, still smiling. "Working all kinds of hours. He says things are getting worse out on the streets—not just the runaways, or even the drugs, really. But drugs mean money, and that means organized crime, Peter says."

  "I imagine he'd know if anyone did," Colin said. "It seems like half the kids on campus are high on something these days."

  And particularly bad—from Colin's admittedly specialized point of view—was that the drugs they were choosing to abuse were some of the ones that had been in the arsenal of High Magick for centuries, to be used—cautiously and under the strictest of controls—to add power to the magician's work and lower the veils between the magician and the Infinite. Now the children seeking to cast off all established standards had seized upon the memoirs of those philosophical pioneers to use them as justification for their own experiments.

  It was hard even now for Colin to feel that they were completely wrong in what they did. But he was convinced absolutely that what they did was dangerous.

  "On drugs, on campus, and in the emergency rooms," Claire agreed. "There are some clinics around town that specialize in drug overdoses—well, that and VD," she said frankly. "That's how bad it's getting. Still, you've always said that each generation finds its own—'appalling forms of excess,' I believe your words were."

  "Good heavens, I must have been in a foul mood that day," Colin said, smiling sheepishly. "I may be getting old, but the youth of today still strikes me as somehow . . . reckless."

  '"Live fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse,'" Claire quoted flippantly. "At least, if the Bomb lets you—leave a corpse, I mean. But how did we ever get onto such a depressing subject on such a pretty day? Let's find something nicer to talk about."

  "All right," Colin said. "I saw Alison the other day. She and Simon are back from their jaunt back East—"

  The two friends kept their conversation turned to lighter subjects for a few minutes, but as soon as the waitress—a cheerful young woman in tie-dyed overalls—had taken their orders and left them, the conversation turned inevitably back to Thorne Blackburn once more.

  "I've only met him a couple of times when I was visiting Debbie, and I guess he isn't that much crazier than some of these other antiwar demonstrators," Claire said. "But Jonathan dropping out to go live at the Voice of Truth}" Her voice was bewildered and disapproving. "It's an underground paper, sort of a—well, a bully pulpit; Thorne writes most of it himself and it all seems to be about astrology and Tarot cards and that sort of thing. Well, that and Thorne Blackburn's philosophy and politics. Debbie keeps trying to give me copies of the thing—they han
d it out free, or you pay whatever you like—but I'll admit I've never read one." She took a bite of her salad, which was filled with chunks of fresh chicken and exotic greens, all in a wonderful herbed vinegar dressing.

  "Dropping out a semester before graduation is bad enough, "Colin answered, still thinking of Jonathan, "but it isn't only that. As far as I could gather, Jonathan intends to sign over his trust fund to the Master as well. Granted, Jonathan's a big boy now, and it's his money, and he's got a right to do as he likes with it—"

  "But you think he ought to be a little more careful with it—and if he's planning to underwrite the Voice of Truth, so do I," Claire said. "I honestly don't like the sound of this at all. Why don't we pay a visit to Thorne Blackburn and see what you make of him? I'm sure if I give Debbie a call she can get us into the Presence."

  FIVE

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, JUNE 1965

  As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow, Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear.

  — ROBERT SOUTHWELL

  THE AUDITORIUM IN THE FILMORE DISTRICT HAD FIRST BEEN A VAUDEVILLE house and then a movie palace. It had fallen on hard times and lain derelict for some years, until a shift in the tastes—not to mention the age—of the audience interested in live music had made its reopening economically possible. That the building was undoubtedly in violation of a hundred building code standards was a matter of indifference to the young audience—some teenaged runaways, some Bay Area locals with steady jobs—that filled its shabby moth-eaten seats nightly.

  In the place of the movie posters of yesteryear, the outside of the auditorium was plastered with bright, eye-hurting placards advertising upcoming performances. The bands had names out of Disney cartoons and dope dreams. The psychedelic iconography that accompanied them was as precisely surreal as a Windsor McCay illustration, a sort of post-Apocalyptic Art Nouveau manque.

  The time was a little after nine o'clock. The show was supposed to have begun at 7:30, with Blackburn scheduled to come on at nine, but apparently several of the bands who were supposed to appear had been late coming in or had run long, and when Colin and Claire arrived, Blackburn had not even arrived at the auditorium yet.

  They could hear the music even at the box office outside, and when they entered the auditorium itself, the sound became a solid wall, filling the space as if it were a thing with form and weight. The air-conditioning had fought the good fight and lost; the air was close and sweltering, charged with the scents of tobacco, unwashed bodies, and drugs. The stage was lit intermittently by flashing strobes and spotlights with colored gels over the lenses, their colored beams in constant motion. Scenes that seemed to have no connection to the music were projected on the screen behind the musicians, bathing them in a shifting sea of form and color.

  The effect was as disorienting as a bomb blast, and Colin stopped dead, senses reeling. He felt Claire clutch at his hand, whether to save him or herself, he wasn't certain.

  On stage, five long-haired boys in velvet coats were playing, the distorted, amplified sound assaulting its listeners like a physical force. The guitars they carried looked like child's drawings, flat and brightly colored, and the amplified sound of the drums echoed through the crowded auditorium like gunshots.

  "Loud!" Claire shouted in his ear, and Colin nodded.

  The crowd was packed into the old vaudeville palace as tightly as the hordes in a Cairo bazaar, sweltering in the still air. Despite that, there were a few seats empty at the back, and once he'd gotten his bearings, Colin moved toward two of them, Claire in tow. Once he was seated, he took the opportunity to look around the auditorium.

  The balcony was blocked off as too rickety to support the weight of occupants; despite that, it was filled with listeners who shouted and clapped and danced along with the amplified sounds of music played so loud that the battering of drums and basses shook plaster dust from the walls and ceiling throughout the performance.

  But despite the unfamiliarity of his surroundings, Colin could tell that there was a sense of joyous anticipation in the air, a sort of Christmas morning expectancy, as though what was to come was wonderful, was worthy, was all those things that had been absent from the world for far too long. Here was the answer to the black mood that had possessed him so often of late, the refutation of the sense of decay and despair.

  He hadn't gotten old, Colin MacLaren realized with a sudden rueful awakening. He'd gotten tired.

  When was it precisely that he had lost his way into this sense of joy? When had life become something to get through with as few mistakes as possible, instead of a glorious adventure to savor? The Path taught that its disciples must risk their lives as well as save them; when had he lost sight of that eternal truth?

  "It's just going to get louder," Claire warned, squeezing Colin's hand to make sure he heard her over the wash of raw noise.

  "I'll survive," Colin promised her.

  The music was hardly the point, Colin was beginning to realize. Like some Dionysian cult of old, the audience howled itself into ecstacy, battered by the music and primed by expectation and the experience of a hundred previous concerts. The band surged into a new number, and the audience roared enthusiastically and began to clap, whether in time with the wailing, distorted noise of the electric guitars, or simply as a commentary, Colin couldn't tell. He could not follow the audience on their journey, but at last he began to understand where it was they were going—on the path toward the Unconquerable Sun followed by the seekers in every generation.

  But in this generation it was as if the trailblazers had determined that this time no one was to be left behind when the journey was made. All must go. The doors of perception would be opened to all.

  Two hours later Colin's insight was unchanged, though his temper was less sanguine and his head ached from the constant battering of sheer noise and the psychedelic light show that accompanied it. Blackburn had still not made an appearance, and there was little to distinguish the sounds the performers made onstage from those made by construction workers with jack-hammers, at least in Colin MacLaren's opinion. His throat and lungs ached from the harsh smoke that hung like a blue pall in the sweltering air. If he felt lightheaded just from breathing, he could only imagine what those actually smoking the stuff felt.

  The performers on stage fell silent amid disappointed shouts from the crowd. The musicians unplugged their guitars and wandered off the stage and a sheer scrim dropped between the drumset on its platform and the apron.

  All the lights went out.

  In the darkness, the wail of a single amplified flute could be heard, and against it, the sound of a voice chanting Aeschylus' "Hymn to the Sun" in flawless classical Greek.

  Then a bright red spotlight snapped on, illuminating a figure in a fantastic costume: a long black tailcoat over a tie-dyed T-shirt, blue jeans sewn with rhinestones, and a shiny top hat displaying the Uraeus disk flanked by glittering cobras.

  "Dudes and chicks—Epopts and Illuminati: The Magister Ludens of the New Aeon, Thorne Blackburn!"

  Thorne Blackburn turned out to be younger than Colin had thought he would be—a young man barely out of his teens, maybe even Claire's age. Long blond curls spilled over his shoulders, making him look like a cross between General Custer and a dimestore Jesus. His eyes were blue enough to retain their color even under the harsh theatrical lighting.

  What Blackburn gave the crowd that night was an unholy mesalliance of genuine Mystery School teachings, parlor tricks, Beat poetry, and pop history—promising his hearers that by thinking good thoughts they could play St. George to a military-industrial dragon of international greed and corruption. The claims he made for his personal history and occult teachings were too outrageous for any sane person to take seriously, and in general his audience seemed to take Blackburn's remarks in the spirit of entertainment. His patter had the well-oiled eas
e of the stage illusionist's, and Colin was possibly the only one who noticed that in the space of five minutes Blackburn had made his audience quiet and attentive as he quickly explained about the four essential elements that were also the four pillars of creation.

  But no matter how debased his pied and emended liturgy, what Blackburn did here had power; Colin could feel it. It was foolishness—sloppy, undisciplined, madness, like handing a flamethrower to a baby. But Blackburn made it work. Colin felt the potency he summoned—and beside him, Claire did, too, shivering uncertainly and clutching at his hand as if for reassurance.

  "—so that as you become a part of the Universal, boys and girls, the Universe becomes a part of you. So let's invite the Universe to the party!"

  While Blackburn had been speaking, other figures, garbed in long hooded robes, had entered the stage. Four of them bore the familiar Tools of the magician—sword and paten, wand and cup—and two of the others carried a lighted candle and a censer that put out a thick fog of smoke, the smoke changing colors as the images of the light show hit it.

  Quickly—the man was as aware as any performer of how easy it was to lose the attention of an audience—Blackburn summoned the Elements: earth, water, air, and fire. His amplified voice boomed out over the crowd, and mixed into his sideshow patter were the great Names that Colin had sworn to keep secret, tossed casually against the ears of the hoi polloi like pearls onto a seashore.

  Lord of Light, be knows what he's doing, was Colin's first horrified thought. This was no form of magick he had ever seen—it was magick without form, without ritual, a casual elemental summoning of the primal forces of creation, through nothing more than the strength of Blackburn's charisma. It was power summoned without wards, without barriers, without limits, power called with only love to build a bridge, as if between equals.

  Outrage, irritation, and shock momentarily threatened to overwhelm him, but Colin kept his temper. He'd known before he'd come that Blackburn had some magickal training, after all, and people weren't banished from the White Orders without good reason. Like so many before him, Blackburn had obviously decided to turn the use of the Great Secrets that he'd been taught to mundane ends—and, as with those before him, the Order's greatest defense was simply to take no notice of him, protecting the Secrets by misdirection.