Ghostlight Read Free

one she didn’t. Rouncival Press.
    Frowning, she tore it open.
    And tore it. And tore it, until the envelope and three sheets of heavy paper were in postage-stamp-sized tatters on her desk. Her hands shook. How could they? How dare they?
    â€œ … since you have also chosen a career in the occult … valuable service … intimate glimpses of a great pioneer of magic …”
    They wanted her to write a biography of Thorne Blackburn.
    Her hands were still shaking as she scooped the pieces of paper into her wastebasket. She was a scientist—she had a master’s in Mathematics! Write an eulogistic biography of Thorne Blackburn? She’d rather bury him with a stake through his heart—and he was already dead.
    And what was worse, he was her father.
    Truth stared unseeingly at a poster of the Olana Historical Site on her cubicle wall. Thirty years ago Thorne Blackburn had been at the forefront of the occult revival that went hand-in-hand with the free love and antiwar movements of the 1960s. As sexy as Morrison, as fiery as Jagger—and as crazy as Hendrix—Blackburn had claimed to be a hero in the Greek sense, a half-divine son of the Shining Ones, the Celtic Old Gods. Though such declarations later became commonplace, with people claiming to be the children of everything from space aliens to earth angels, Thorne Blackburn had been the first.
    He’d been the first to do a number of other things, too, from appearing on national television to conduct a ritual for his Old Gods to touring with rock bands as the opening act. Half heretic, half fraud, and all showman, Blackburn was one of the brightest lights of the occult revival during his brief, gaudy, public career.

    And he’d made it pay, Truth thought angrily. While publicly he claimed to be founding an order of heroes and working magick to bring the Ancient Gods of the West into the world again and inaugurate the “New Aeon,” Blackburn had somehow managed to amass the cash to buy a Hudson River mansion where he and his special followers could practice the rites of his so-called Circle of Truth in an atmosphere of free love, free drugs, and wild excess.
    Among those followers had been Katherine Jourdemayne.
    Truth felt the faint stirrings of a headache as she contemplated the old, familiar betrayal. Her mother had been Blackburn’s “mystical concubine.” Katherine had died in 1969 in one of his rituals, and Blackburn hadn’t had to pay for that, either.
    Because that same night—April 30, 1969—Thorne Blackburn had vanished from the face of the earth.
    Truth had been raised by Katherine Jourdemayne’s twin sister, Caroline, and Truth felt she had inherited much of her emotional self-sufficiency from the taciturn woman who had weathered the horrible death of her twin sister so stoically. Aunt Caroline had told Truth who her father was when she was old enough to understand, but in the seventies and early eighties it didn’t seem to matter much. When the first journalist contacted her, Truth had even been surprised to discover that anyone still remembered Thorne Blackburn; he seemed to belong to the past, like LSD, the moon landing, and the Beatles. She had been courteous, though brief, telling him she had nothing to say, because her father died when she was two.
    It was the last time she was ever that polite, because once the “gentlemen of the press” had found her, her life quickly became a nightmare of letters and telephone calls—and worse: visits from bizarre individuals who claimed they were followers, and in one horrible instance, the reincarnation —of Thorne Blackburn.

    And every Halloween since she was eighteen Truth had suffered through the various calls from a particular breed of grave-robbing yellow journalist who wanted an interview with the daughter of the notorious “Satanist” Thorne Blackburn to spice up a story.
    The requests from the literary lunatic