Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (56 page)

 
          
But
President Quiller did not seem to be anywhere in the front of the house, and
after a few moments of fruitless searching, Dr. Newland conducted Colin over
to a small group of people.

 
          
"I
suppose I should at least introduce you to
someone,
dear boy; Lee Chapman
—
John Dexter
—
Miriam Gardner
—
Morgan Ives," Dr.
Newland said, introducing the two men and two women. "All my respected
colleagues. But let me leave you to get acquainted and I'll see if I can find
Harold. I know he'll be anxious to meet you."

 
          
If
there's anything left after the lions are finished,
Colin thought,
surveying the group. These four people were most of the current staff of the
institute, and this was the first time Colin had been given the chance to meet
them.

 
          
Of
the four of them, only Morgan Ives and John Dexter looked really comfortable
in formal dress. Morgan wore her quilted satin maxiskirt and pleated gold lame
peasant blouse with the slapdash eccentricity of a diva, and her wrists were
weighted with bracelets until she had the look of a woman chained.

 
          
"Colin
MacLaren," she said in greeting, extending her hand. The bracelets
clinked. Her nails were long and blunt-tipped, lacquered a deep arterial red.
"How charming to meet you. I'm certain we shall deal splendidly
together."

 
          
"Cut
it out, Morgan. MacLaren eats table-tippers like you for breakfast,"
Dexter said amiably. His hands were thrust deep into the pockets of the tuxedo
that he wore as easily as if it were a business suit. For some reason, he looked
oddly familiar to Colin.

 
          
"I
never tipped a table in my life, Dexxy," Morgan snapped, withdrawing her
hand and glaring at him.

 
          
"Maybe
not
—
but
you fall for every single person who does," Dexter said, before turning
back to Colin. "John Dexter. I've followed your debunking work with great
interest."

 
          
Suddenly
Colin realized why Dexter had seemed so familiar. "Have I the honor of
addressing Theophrastus the Great?" he asked.

 
          
"Ah.
You've heard of me?" Dexter said, pleased.

 
          
"I
had the opportunity to watch you work once at the
Magic
Castle
. I've never seen more
artful closeup work," Colin answered honestly.

 
          
"The
classic stage illusions are fun," Dexter said, "but essentially the
audience knows it's being fooled and doesn't really care how. Closeup, they've
got no choice but to care." He produced a coin from nowhere and walked it
across the back of his fingers, grinning engagingly.

 
          
"I
see you've met Newland's pet magician in a previous life," Lee Chapman
said ungraciously, "though professional bully might be closer to the mark.
Once our Mr. Dexter has finished what he calls 'making sure they're not
cheating,' my psychics are so demoralized they can't possibly demonstrate their
powers."

 
          
"Possibly
because they haven't got any to begin with," Dexter responded, with an
irritability that suggested that this was a feud of long standing. He flipped
the coin up into the air and it vanished. "In all my years practicing the
Art, I've never seen
—
"

 
          
"Gentlemen,"
Miriam Gardner said, firmly enough to silence both of them. "There's no
point in trying to scare him off
—
like it or not, he's our new boss. So let's be nice to
him." She smiled at Colin a little nervously.

 
          
Miriam
Gardner was somewhere on the far side of forty, partridge-plump and short. She
was wearing a dress in a trying shade of bronze that looked as if she had run
it up out of a set of old brocade curtains, and her short-cropped hair was
hennaed an unconvincing shade of red. She reminded Colin very much of a forest
creature caught far from cover, blinking confusedly in the light of oncoming
headlights.

 
          
"Well,
then, he'll hear all of our nonsense soon enough," Chapman said with
ponderous jocularity
—
and more generosity than Colin had expected of him.
"I'm willing to bury the hatchet for tonight."

 
          
"I'm
looking forward to talking to each of you individually about the future of the
institute," Colin said. "Though I doubt that what any of you will
have to say is nonsense, Mr. Chapman."

 
          
Chapman's
field was telepathy and remote viewing, while Ives was interested in
mediumship as it related to personality survivals and transfers
—
ghosts, in mundane
parlance.
Gardner
seemed primarily to be a
folklorist, from what Colin was able to glean from the records kept at the
institute.

 
          
"It's
all
nonsense," Dexter assured him with the blithe confidence of the
devout unbeliever. "Let's talk about something else. Oh, here's Lion;
Lion, come meet our newest victim
—
"

 
          
Colin
had just begun to exchange pleasantries with Professor Lionel Welling
—
Lion to his friends
—
when he felt a ripple around
him, rather like the reaction of a school offish to the approach of a shark.

 
          
"Ah,
Dr. MacLaren," Harold Quiller said, appearing at last. "There you
are. I've so looked forward to meeting you."

 
          
President
Quiller moved toward Colin in much the fashion of an ocean liner cutting off a
tugboat. From the corner of his eye, Colin could see that the institute staff
had vanished with the ease of long practice.

 
          
Colin
had met Quiller previously, during the interviewing process; the man was a born
politician, and had gone after the Bidney money with the single-minded rapacity
of a seventeenth-century corsair after a Mughal treasure ship. That Colin had
achieved his appointment over Quiller's own candidate
—
a man who had championed the
notion of a series of "pass-throughs" from the institute's budget to
the college's
—
the Taghkanic president considered to be a setback,
nothing more.

 
          
Their
conversation this evening had more in common with a fencing match than with any
real exchange of information. What Quiller wanted tonight was assurances that
Colin would take his cue from the administration; Colin was prepared to offer
no such promises. After several minutes, Quiller surrendered the field, and
wished Colin a long and happy future at the institute. As he walked off, Colin
had the relieved feeling of one who had baited a tiger and gotten away with it.

 
          
"Score
one for the new boy," Dexter said, sotto voce, appearing again. "You
look like a man who needs a drink." He held out a plastic cup containing
an amber liquid, no ice.

 
          
Colin
smiled, a little grimly. He might have won the skirmish, but it looked like it
was going to be a long war. He accepted the drink gratefully. Scotch. Either it
was a lucky guess, or Dexter had done his homework.

 
          
With
the obligatory clash with Quiller out of the way, Colin made it his business to
meet most of the faculty of Taghkanic. Many of those Colin met, such as
Professors Auben Rhys and Lionel Welling of the Drama Department, were
perfectly amiable, but there were others who were as coolly antagonistic as
the college president.

 
          
Along
the way, he cemented his impression that academics the universe over had more
similarities than differences. If he closed his eyes, Colin could imagine he
was back on the
Berkeley
campus a dozen years ago
—
and since Taghkanic was a
liberal arts college, most of the political convictions weren't much different
from those of
Berkeley
in the sixties, either.

 
          
"I
don't care
what
you say, Lion," Selena Purcifer said resentfully.
"The library's book budget has been cut again, just so a bunch of
crackpots can chase UFOs. I don't particularly find that a cause for
celebration."

 
          
"Now
Purcy," Lion Welling said pacifically, "the one has nothing to do
with the other. Everybody's budget's been cut. It's the nature of the
beast."

 
          
Colin
turned away before they could catch him eavesdropping. Selena Purcifer was the
Library Director, and one of the people he particularly hoped to win over to
his cause. If the Bidney Institute now possessed the Rhodes Group's case files,
it would be an enormous job of cataloguing to get the material ready for the
public, and he'd need to work closely with the library staff. Possibly there
was a way to arrange a pass-through of Bidney money to the library without
opening the floodgates to a wholesale looting of the institute. But that, too,
was a problem to be approached in the future.

 
          
He
was glad enough to be pulled into another conversation, and doubly relieved
that it had nothing to do with either the college or the institute. Finally
the reception was over, and President Quiller's guests filed in to dinner.

 
          
While
there were isolated moments of shoptalk and upcoming events of the fall term
around the table, most of the talk at dinner was about current events,
particularly the Watergate trial, which was still dragging on. The hearings had
been televised since May, and had held a sort of perverse fascination for
Colin; he'd watched them whenever he could.

 
          
Predictably,
the staff of a liberal arts college unanimously condemned Nixon and his
activities, but to Colin's mild surprise, none of them probed any deeper, or
asked how such things could ever have happened. Corruption and moral
indifference on such a scale could not be an isolated incident, nor did it
flourish in a vacuum, but none of the people at the table asked the vital
questions: who, and how, and how long.

 
          
It
was as if none of them wanted to believe that the Watergate scandal could be
the result of anything more than one man's evil, easily blotted out with an
impeachment. The discussion left Colin feeling unspeakably depressed, as
though he were listening in on the self-important chatter of young children.
But these were the people who were shaping the minds of the next generation;

 
          
Thome
was right; Simon was right; even
—
God help me
—
Toller Hasloch was right,
may his soul find peace in its imprisonment. In the only way that really
matters, we lost the war. We were fighting for the American way of life
—
the four freedoms
—
and they simply don't exist
in this country anymore.

 
          
And
each year, it takes a greater effort to remain blind to that fact. . . .

GLASTONBURY
, SEPTEMBER 1979

 
          
FOR
THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS COLIN AND I SOMEHOW SAW MUCH LESS OF each other. It was
as if he were shutting the world out, though on the surface he had thrown
himself more into the world than ever, at the turbulent Bidney Institute in
upstate
New
York
.
Perhaps in some way Simon's accident had injured Colin as well, and made him a
dark and desperate man, though I think something must have happened to him even
before that.

 
          
Whatever
it was, Colin never spoke of it, in that way that we left so many things
between us unsaid. But after that terrible Christmas when Simon was crippled,
he was very much changed. It was as if in fighting for the institute's
survival, Colin was fighting for his own life as well.

 
          
But
slowly his hard work brought success. He hired new staff, both exploiting the
assets that Dr. Newland had left him and drawing on his old Rhodes Group
contacts. Within a few short years the institute developed the reputation for
sympathetic but tough study of matters touching upon the Unseen World. God help
the researcher whom Colin caught faking his results
—
and nothing could help the
psychic who tried to fool him.

 
          
When
he confronted psychic frauds was the only time I ever saw Colin really lose his
temper
—
not
with the cold, furious, sense of purpose I had known him to exhibit so often,
but with a roaring Scots rage that thundered like a summons to judgment. There
were few people who could stand up to him under those circumstances, and none
of the sort that John Dexter so happily called "table-tippers," in
which category John included not only fake mediums and bogus Spiritualists but
every form of psychic con and fraud. I do believe that sometimes he
deliberately sought those people out and encouraged them to apply to the
institute, just for the joy of watching Colin read them out of the book.

 
          
Poor
John. Wherever he is now, I wish him eager audiences, and an inspiration that
never fades. He was a gallant, fearless soul, taken from us far too soon.

 
          
But
that is an old sorrow, and he was certainly there for the first years of
Colin's regime
—
and I use the term advisedly
—
acerbic court jester to the
reigning lion.

 
          
From
the first, Colin had a very definite view of what the institute should be and
how he could achieve his vision. He insisted on the strictest code of standards
and ethics from all the members of the institute, and even taught a course on
occult ethics himself, making it mandatory for all freshmen who wished to enter
the parapsychology program. You did not study Parapsychology at Taghkanic
without a solid understanding of what Colin MacLaren considered right and
wrong.

 
          
What
sin he was trying to expiate through this I never knew. It would have been
impertinent of me to ask, and unnecessary besides
—
Colin was always harder on
himself than any outsider could ever have been.

 
          
Years
passed, and what we asked out of life changed imperceptibly, month by passing
month, so that it was only years later that each of us awoke to find ourselves
on pathways that I imagine he had looked to follow as little as I had. Had
Colin ever expected to be attempting to prescribe the morals of a generation?
Yet what was he doing at the Bidney Institute, if not that?

 
          
And
as for me . . .

 
          
In
1976 I was thirty-five. In her thirties, a woman finally escapes the shadow of
her childhood and the inevitability of her family's expectations of her into
her own adulthood, becoming at last a person of her own creation.

 
          
Though
I had severed ties with my own family long ago, and my adopted family was dead,
I carried as much emotional baggage with me as anyone else my age did. More
than anything, I think, I had never felt entitled to my own happiness, but 1976
was the year that I finally grew up, and realized that no one was standing in
the way of my fulfillment but me.

 
          
For
many years my dream had been to own a bookstore, and in that year I opened
Inquire Within in
Glastonbury
,
New York
.

 
          
I'd
decided a long time ago that the sort of bookstore I wanted was called in those
days an "occult bookstore," but I also knew that I didn't want it to
be anything like the Sorcery Shoppe, with its jarsful of dried bats and mummified
frogs. I wanted a bookstore that could also be a refuge for seekers as troubled
as I had once been.

 
          
It
was the worst time in twenty years to start a small business
—
inflation rates were through
the roof and money was tight
—
but I had my savings and Peter's insurance and I was
determined not to wait any longer to do what I had dreamed of for so long.

 
          
You
might say that I chose
Glastonbury
to be near Colin
—
and that might be so, for he
badly needed friends in those years, but as much as it might have been for that
reason, my choice of location was a pragmatic business decision. On the most
basic level, I couldn't possibly have afforded to open an "occult
bookstore" in
Manhattan
—
I would have gone broke in a
New York minute, as the saying goes. I needed a place where the rents were low
but I still had a built-in clientele, and
Glastonbury
seemed tailor-made for my
ambitions.

 
          
What
better place than a town near a college that offered a doctorate in
Parapsychology? I located an empty store; Colin drafted my labor force from
among his students, and in short order, Inquire Within was open for business.

 
          
And
I was lucky; the store thrived, and soon I found myself up to my nose in
wholesale catalogues, confronting an array of products whose existence I had
never even suspected. My favorites were the aerosol cans of
Hex Be Gone
—
brand
spray incense and the
All-In-One Witch Kits, which guaranteed that they contained everything you
needed to become a witch and cast a spell.

 
          
Needless
to say, neither object found its way into Inquire Within, though I did stock a
small selection of harmless oils, teas, and incenses. But most of all, I
stocked books, because what I wanted to provide at Inquire Within was
knowledge. Never before
—
or since, in my opinion
—
was there such a need for
it.

 
          
By
the 1970s, spirituality had become a part of the women's movement, divorced
almost completely from its magickal antecedents. Wicca, which in the beginning
most people had considered the little sister of Satanism, had prospered as an
Earth Religion that owed no debt to Christianity, and which paved the way for
other forms of Neo-Paganism.

 
          
It
was Goddess worship, not magick, that most of my customers were interested in.
Though they weren't adverse to casting spells, their magick was of the simplest
sort. If you had asked any of them to calculate planetary hours or to cast a
horoscope to determine the governing angel for their rituals, they would simply
have laughed: American efficiency was finally being applied to magick, with
admittedly peculiar results.

 
          
Though
I was never tempted to give up my own faith, I still saw the feminist witches'
covens and Goddess healing circles as a good thing, a necessary counterbalance
to the deeply materialistic currents that were beginning to reshape daily
life. Yuppies were replacing yippies, and those who had been on the barricades
a few years before were laying away their idealism in lavender and turning to
the brutal business of making a living.

 
          
At
least, most of them were.

 
          
And
then, of course, there was Hunter Greyson. . . .