Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “You must be glad to be home—or maybe not,” Simon said, with his beguiling mixture of maturity and boyish enthusiasm. “But tell me—if I’m not being too presumptuous—Dr. Margrave tells me that you’re also active in parapsychological circles?”

  “Simon! You make Colin sound like a flight of china dishes,” Alison teased, coming back into the room. Both men stood, and Simon hurried to retrieve her glass from the side-table and refill it with the excellent Burgundy.

  “Now Alison, would you deprive me of the chance to expound upon my favorite subject? After all, I’ve spent the last two months dinning the basics of scientific method into the ears of my freshman class; it would be a relief to discuss the topic with someone who doesn’t think ‘parapsychology’ is a synonym for ‘elementary voodoo.’”

  Both Simon and Alison laughed at the mild joke, and Alison said:

  “Have you been able to get any fieldwork done? Simon and I had a fascinating case last year: a poltergeist right here in the city—remember that case up on Russian Hill, Simon?”

  “How could I forget it?” Simon said with rueful humor, rubbing an imaginary bump on the side of his head. “After I took that Brodie down the stairs I was sore for a week—the last time I will underestimate the Unseen, even assuming I’d been inclined to do so in the first place.”

  The talk turned naturally to their mutual field of interest, and Colin discovered that Simon Anstey was already a dedicated researcher in the infant field of parapsychology, and also fascinated by the shadowy world of magick.

  “If there is a world beyond the one we know, why shouldn’t we be able to affect it just as we do the material one?” Simon asked over dinner. “The physical body affects the physical world—why shouldn’t the subtle body affect the spiritual world?”

  Greenhaven did not have a separate dining room—Alison having sacrificed that possibility to a larger music room—but the spacious Victorian kitchen had plenty of room for a lovely old rock maple farmhouse table that could have accommodated twice their number. Dressed up with white damask and a silver candlestick or two, the setting was quite elegant, even with the kitchen appliances hulking in the background. And Colin did have to admit that the location guaranteed that the food reached the table hot.

  “Some of the ways we manage to affect our material world aren’t something you’d want to expand to the spiritual realm. Look at soil erosion—strip mining—air pollution. Rachel Carson’s written some pretty disturbing books. It would be nice to think that one reality, at least, was safe from that.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” Simon said impatiently, brushing aside Colin’s objections. “There’s so much we could learn, so much we could do, if we could put Magick on the same rational footing that Science is. Scientists don’t shiver in terror every time they look through a microscope—they don’t worry that they’ll be struck down by jealous gods for every new insight into how the universe works—”

  “But they do treat their material and their subject with the respect they deserve,” Alison reminded her pupil. “The Unseen world is a dangerous place for the unprepared. But you’re young yet, Simon. You have your whole life ahead of you. There will be plenty of time for your studies: lifetimes.”

  “I know, Alison,” Simon said contritely.

  But though he dropped the subject, and for the rest of the evening the talk turned on other things, Colin wondered about the ambition that had been so clearly revealed in Simon Anstey’s self as he spoke of his aspirations. Too much passion was as dangerous to a would-be Adept as too little, and Simon had passion in full measure. Passion … and something more, something Colin had glimpsed in that brief instant before Alison had turned the subject.

  Something dark.

  Something dangerous.

  TWO

  BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, OCTOBER 1961

  My heart would hear her and beat,

  Were it earth in an earthy bed;

  My dust would hear her and beat;

  Had I lain for a century dead;

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  THE NEW YEAR BEGAN BADLY—THE UNITED STATES BROKE DIPLOMATIC ties to Cuba, and bitter fighting broke out—or resumed—in a number of places that had only been meaningless names on a map a few years before: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. There were Soviet incursions everywhere, it seemed, and the Communist superpower had managed to orbit and recover a cosmonaut, blazing the trail to its conquest of the ultimate high ground.

  In Israel, the trial of newly-captured Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichman began in a chaos of news coverage and security precautions. The testimony awakened half-hidden memories for Colin MacLaren, and made him realize that the horrors of the Final Solution had not been conquered, but buried. Set aside, as if, like a fretful nightmare, ignoring them would make them disappear. Even its victims—those with the most personal stake in keeping those atrocities from ever happening again—were as reluctant to bring up the past as a burned child is to touch fire.

  Eichman’s trial changed that, though perhaps not enough. But it was enough to rouse Colin once more to the fear that the peaceful home-front years that America had enjoyed since the fall of the Reich had not been the healing sleep that follows great effort, but the drowsing coma that springs from a poisoned wound. His greatest fear—the one he lived with always—was that what the White Adepts had done had been too little, too late.

  1961. The new West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, came to America to meet with her young president only days before an American general in Germany was relieved of his command over fears of his ties to a new conservative organization, the John Birch Society. When Adenauer returned home, it was to form a coalition government that brought a temporary peace to defeated and partitioned Germany—a peace increasingly troubled by the Communist dictatorship in the East.

  Was the East, just as the politicians had feared, the direction from which the new threat was to come? This year the Berlin Wall had gone up almost overnight, turning from rolls of barbed wire to a brick-and-cement cliff-face standing in the middle of a bleak dead zone. The phrase “Checkpoint Charlie” became common currency, and the Berlin Wall became a visible sign of the tension between Democratic and Communist Germany, East and West … just as a Russian ballet dancer named Rudolph Nureyev—who had defected as his troupe was performing in Paris—would come to be seen as a symbol of Eastern oppression and Western liberation.

  Had the West smashed the Nazis only to allow their dark torch to be passed to the heirs of Stalin? Had the protean evil that Colin’s Order fought simply found another form? Perhaps he—Alison—all of them—had been wrong in thinking that the great Dragon had been defeated. Perhaps they had only crushed the outer shell of the darkness without destroying its spirit, and now that spirit was roused once more to hunt for new disciples.

  There was enough new evidence that he was right to render Colin MacLaren an increasingly troubled man, for he knew that the Material Plane—what most non-Adepts thought of as the Real World—was merely the reflection cast by the True Reality that existed on the Inner Planes.

  As within, so without …

  But not every battle on the Material Plane was a matter for an Adept to concern himself with, for spiritual evolution was a force as harsh and ruthless as the physical evolution practiced by Nature. Nations were sacrificed, whole races blotted out, in Spirit’s quest for the Light. What Colin found cruel or unjust was not necessarily a sign of the Light’s jeopardy, though such a philosophical view was never an excuse for those on the Path to countenance brutality. Certainty was a dangerous gift, and it had not been granted to him.

  April was the cruelest month … an attempted countercoup by Cuban refugees who landed at the Bay of Pigs failed, and it began to seem—as the first civilian aircraft was hijacked to Havana a few weeks later—that newly Communist Cuba would be the pretext for the nuclear war that began to seem frighteningly inevitable. The death of United Nations’ president, Dag Hammarskjöld, on a peace mission to the
Congo, simply underscored how fragile the peace of the Cold War was, and the peace that a generation had fought for seemed more and more illusory as the year wore on.

  That was the spring the Freedom Riders left Washington for Louisiana, a pilgrimage from which some would not return, as if in proof of Colin’s fears that the war had come home and become a secret war, with battle lines yet to be drawn and a battlefield set in the hearts and minds of men and women.

  It was a war in which Colin began to realize that he would have a part to play, though as yet he did not know what it was … .

  Has it already been a year? Colin wondered to himself. Yes, that and a little more.

  The windows of his hillside bungalow rattled demandingly each time a gust of wind struck them. Occasionally there was a dry rattle as pebbles and fallen leaves—mostly from the groves of eucalyptus that covered the hills—were dashed against the walls by the wind. The autumn color that Colin was used to from his Hudson Valley childhood was not a feature of October in the Bay Area; instead, in fall the natural world seemed simply to dim, to be transfigured by the winter rains from the gold and blue of summer into the silver and brilliant green of winter.

  On this night, Colin found himself grateful to be tucked up snugly in his own living room with a favorite pipe and a glass of Scotch. The night had come early, and the scudding clouds played across the face of the waning moon. This night, of all the nights in the year, always made him uneasy.

  It was Halloween.

  There were many parties being held this Tuesday evening, both on campus and off, and he’d been eagerly invited to several of them by his student advisees, but somehow Colin hadn’t felt like company this evening. Better to stay at home with his memories, and not inflict his company on those who would not understand. Tonight was a night for ghosts, and Colin had many.

  Perhaps he was simply out of tune with the triviality of this so-American holiday, which turned what had once been a powerful and portentous night that marked a shift in the currents of the year into nothing but a light-minded excuse for revelry. Hours earlier, the neighborhood children—dressed as movie monsters and cartoon characters—had rung doorbells all along Colin’s street begging sweets. As Colin gave them their treats—forestalling the threatened tricks—he wondered if any of their parents suspected that they were participating in the pallid and adulterated end of a grisly pagan custom.

  Autumn bonfires had once been bone-fires; on this night, once upon a time, it had been believed that the dead returned to the living world, to be placated with food and blood and coaxed to return to their barrow-graves for another year’s slumber. It was a night that still held power for those with hearts to feel it—power so strong that even the innocent and unwary were sometimes tangled in its unseen net.

  What power was out there tonight, stalking the hills that surrounded the Bay? Colin wondered. He’d coasted through his classes that day almost unaware of his audience, so preoccupied was he by something at the very edge of perception—something more urgent even than the force of memory. He’d cut short his office hours—on Halloween, the students felt that there were more important calls on their time, in any event—and come home, where he’d prowled around the rooms of his little bungalow like a caged bear, trying to isolate the source of his unease.

  All that came to his seeking attention were fragmentary images—cathedrals of evil constructed with pillars of light—that could belong as easily to the past as to the clouded present.

  Easier, Colin told himself. In such an outpost of rationalism as the UCB campus, the peculiarly European perversions of the thirties and forties seemed like a bad dream, almost impossible to take seriously. Nathaniel had been right: he had needed to come here in order to let go of the past. What had been once would not be again—no matter how much current world events led him to fear the Shadow’s renaissance.

  But all of Colin’s years of training also urged him not to lightly dismiss any intimation, no matter how ambiguous, of trouble. The unconscious mind was not verbal. It existed outside of time, in direct communication with the Unseen, and it did not use words to communicate with the conscious mind. If his unconscious was attempting to bring something to his conscious attention, it might be using images out of his memory that were linked to importance, or geographical location, or even to a particular type of disturbance.

  But, though psychics were in tune with the future or the far-distant present, the reason most psychics—and Colin MacLaren was emphatically not one—tended to be so erratic in their public predictions was that they lacked the ability to correctly interpret the messages funneled to them by their preconscious minds. Colin’s own sense of disturbance came from an Adept’s training: there was a disruption on the Astral that was strong enough to intrude into the waking material world, but elusive enough that no amount of attentive concentration was enough to bring it fully out of the shadows into a place where his conscious mind could deal with it.

  It was frustrating, and Colin could understand why many on the Path thought that an Adept must be psychic as well: it would be extremely comforting right now to have the ability to demand answers from the Unseen through his own inborn psychic powers. But in some previous life he had chosen to deny himself those abilities, and so Colin had no choice but simply to watch and wait.

  It was after midnight—the older revelers who filled the streets, intent on mischief rather than candy, had finally departed for other localities or their beds, and the neighborhood was quiet once more except for the blustering of the wind. Colin had nearly decided that whatever the unrest was that had troubled him, he would not discover its source tonight, when he heard the sound of a car engine coming toward him through the wind.

  There were few other residents along this dead-end street, and all of their houses were dark at this hour. Colin was unsurprised when he saw the shine of headlights sketch itself across the walls of his living room and heard the engine stutter to a stop outside his house. He walked to the door and opened it.

  The night air was heavy with the promise of the rain that had held off all evening, and the lights of downtown gave a faintly green glow to the low cloud-cover. The car was unfamiliar—a gleaming late model with a scarlet finish that gleamed in the streetlight—but when the inside lights went on, Colin recognized the driver.

  Jonathan Ashwell.

  Slender, dark-haired, and intense, Ashwell was the highly-privileged son of East Coast old money; his full name was Jonathan Griswold Ashwell III, and his father was a U.S. Army general. Jonathan was the sort of student every teacher dreams of having—engaged, assertive, bright. And, unfortunately, young enough to believe that nothing bad could ever happen to him. He was one of Colin’s student advisees, and, though ostensibly working toward a doctorate in psychology, Jonathan was fascinated by that science’s distorting mirror, parapsychology. Colin had liked him at once, and so far he had been able to keep Jonathan’s intellectual curiosity in the comparatively safe shallows of the Rhine experiments and similar research into the back alleyways of human cognition.

  But something had happened to change that. Colin understood that at once, watching Jonathan bound up the steps two at a time, his face white and strained, his tie askew.

  “Professor! Thank God you’re here—I didn’t know where else to go.” He seemed almost hysterical, and Colin feared the worst. There were so many missteps a young man could make at this stage in his life. But it was not Jonathan’s mistakes that had kept him up waiting so late.

  “Come inside, Jonathan,” Colin said, holding the screen door open. “I’m sure we can figure out something.”

  “No—you don’t understand—she’s in the car—”

  For an instant Colin’s blood went chill, and then he was sprinting down the steps of the house, past a surprised Jonathan Ashwell.

  There was a girl in the passenger seat of the car. She was fair-haired, her light blond hair worn in a short pageboy, and—Colin guessed—fairly tall. She was also unconscious—or d
elirious—her head rolling from side to side against the back of the seat. Her lips moved silently, and her hands twitched in abortive gestures, as though she were dreaming an unheard conversation.

  He took her wrist. Her skin was cold and clammy, the pulse faint and fast. He could see the rapid movement of her eyes beneath the closed eyelids, as though she were in deep REM sleep.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Jonathan said. “We were at this party, and suddenly Claire keeled over and started yelling.”

  “Don’t you mean she yelled and keeled over?” Colin asked. He felt the girl’s forehead. It was dewy with a chill sweat.

  “No. Professor, I swear! Her eyes rolled up in her head and then she started saying all kinds of stuff.”

  Colin slapped the girl’s face gently, trying to rouse her. “What kind of ‘stuff’?” he asked absently.

  “About—oh, I don’t know—the city of the temple and the dragons in the earth—real sci-fi stuff,” Jonathan said awkwardly. “That the dragon would rise up against the city of the temple and against the temple, that was it. And something about the path of the eclipse.”

  It did not sound like ravings to Colin—in fact it sounded oddly cogent—like prophecies still held by his own Order—but that might be mere coincidence. What was important now was finding out just what was the matter with Jonathan’s girlfriend.

  At that moment Claire’s eyes opened, staring unfocusedly past Colin at something that only she could see. In the illumination from the streetlamp he could see that the pupils were wildly dilated, the iris only a pale silvery ring around the edge of the pupil.