“The Sun,” she said in a hoarse distant voice. “The City on the Hill—Master—He’s hanging on the tree and I won’t—” Abruptly she jerked forward, trying to get out of the car. “I can’t stand it,” she muttered in a more normal voice. “Get out—get away. Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
“Be still,” Colin commanded strongly. He suspected what her problem was, now. Claire bore certain signs that Colin had been trained long ago to look for, of a psychic Sensitive whose centers had somehow been forced open. Now she was defenseless, with no shield against an onslaught of sensory input from this world and the next. With the thumb of his right hand he sketched the seal of the pentagram upon her forehead, and had his suspicions confirmed when Claire fell back into her seat, limp.
A magickal seal would have had no effect on any mundane ailment, but it had worked here, giving Claire a momentary peace. Without knowing how the Kether chakra had been opened, he did not dare to try to close it, and it would take him time that Claire did not have to find out. She needed to be in a safe place until her centers could be closed once more.
While one of the basic tenets of parapsychology held that the psychic powers were not at all supernatural—being a gift that, though rare, was a normal part of the human sensory apparatus—it was axiomatic that unless one were dealing with a strong Sensitive, forcing open the psychic centers of the mind would lead at most to a flurry of wild hunches and perhaps a few bad nightmares. Not to the sort of reaction Claire London was manifesting—unless she truly had not had any inkling of what she was.
Colin glanced back at the house. Take her inside? But no—if she was already open and unshielded, bringing her there could be the worst possible thing for her. Colin’s wards were strong, but what lay inside them, though it was of the Light, was something too intense for the uninitiated to stand against. Taking her into the house would only make matters immeasurably worse.
Who did he know in the Bay Area who was equipped to handle this sort of crisis?
“Alison,” Colin said aloud.
Greenhaven was a protected place, one dedicated to the Great Work, and Alison Margrave was rigorous and conscientious in her banishings. No force that Alison did not choose to admit could enter this place while its guardian lived. Claire would be safe there.
“Professor?” Jonathan’s voice was frightened. “What did you do? What’s wrong with Claire?”
“Don’t worry, Jon, I think she’ll be all right if we can get her the kind of help she needs. I’m going to take her to a friend I know. See if you can get her into the backseat; I’m going to go get my coat.”
It was after two by the time they neared Greenhaven. He’d phoned Alison before he’d left, but no one had answered the phone. There might be a dozen reasons for that, and Claire’s trouble could not wait. If Alison was not there when they arrived, Colin could get inside Greenhaven anyway. Without that sanctuary, he feared Claire would die.
Blessedly, Jonathan had trusted him without question, and followed Colin’s directions without hesitation even when they led him away from both the on-campus medical services and Kaiser Hospital. What he must have been thinking as Colin directed him across the Bay and into the foggy hills of San Francisco, Colin hesitated to guess, though he was in the boy’s debt for his wholehearted compliance.
Though he renewed the Seal again and again, all during the journey, Claire kept breaking free of its benign influence. She raved and struggled, weeping and crying out against things Colin could not see. At times it took all of Colin’s strength to restrain her, and he was grateful that he’d had the foresight to have Jonathan put her in the backseat—and to ride back there with her himself. If she’d been in front and able to grab the wheel, they’d probably already have gone off the road more than once.
And as it was, Jonathan was completely terrified. Colin had tried to take his mind off Claire by questioning him in the lulls between her seizures. He learned that Claire London was nineteen, a nursing student attending school on a scholarship, and had been born and raised in Burlingame, which made her that rarest of all creatures, a native Californian. Jonathan didn’t know her well, though he’d dated her a few times the previous year. He hadn’t come to the party with her, though he’d met her there.
“It was just one of Toller’s bashes, you know, Professor. A Halloween party; a couple of people done up as gypsies telling fortunes, Ouija boards—that kind of thing.” His voice was bewildered. “Nothing happened to anyone else—not like that.”
“Did Claire try the Ouija board?” Colin asked. The so-called game was said to be harmless, but in the wrong hands—innocent or otherwise—it provided an undefended route into the unconscious mind as harmful, and potentially lethal, as an amateur’s attempt to repair his television set with an icepick and a hammer.
“No,” Jonathan said. “She hates that sort of thing. Says it’s self-delusion. Parlor tricks. When she saw there was one there, she almost knocked it off the table.”
“Hmn,” Colin said. An interesting reaction from such a strong Sensitive.
Claire’s head lay against his shoulder, her pale hair darkened to honey brown with sweat. Her skirt and sweater were soaked through; her body exuded the thick chemical scent of the sickroom and her pulse had a thready rapidity that Colin did not like to feel. He’d thought he had enough time to risk taking the girl to the safety that Alison could provide, but now he began to think he’d been overconfident.
It was a flaw his teachers had warned him about—with easy mastery of the Path came a brash impetuosity that could lead the Seeker into contests beyond anyone’s strength. Failure tempered the spirit and taught conscientiousness and care, his Masters had told him, but Colin had never allowed himself to fail. Knowing even before he had been born into this life how high the stakes in his youthful battles would be, he had taken the risk in this incarnation of retaining the power and control that were normally the fruits of a long life of striving. As a result, the young Colin MacLaren had been sanguine in the face of hopeless odds … and was perhaps too optimistic now.
“Can’t you hurry?” he asked, fresh tension in his voice.
Jonathan responded by stepping hard on the gas, and the sedan leaped forward into the fog.
It had rained on this side of the Bay, and the twisty streets of the Twin Peaks area were slippery. The car slewed back and forth on the road, and Colin heard a choked sound from Jonathan as the boy fought the wheel. He held his breath, but the car steadied, and the engine wailed as Jonathan downshifted to take the last hill.
“Hurry … hurry,” Colin muttered under his breath. “There!”
Jonathan jammed on his brakes, flinging Colin and Claire both forward against the back of the bucket seats. He dragged the wheel around and gunned the engine, making the car buck and squeal as it lunged up the slanting driveway to Greenhaven.
Alison was waiting for them in the doorway. She reached the car almost before it stopped moving and yanked the passenger side door open.
“Simon told me you’d be coming,” she said, as Colin climbed out of the backseat. “And he’s rarely wrong about someone in trouble. What’s wrong?”
“She’s a Sensitive who’s run into something more than she can handle, I think.” Colin reached into the car and lifted Claire out.
She lay in his arms, limp with the long fight against her unseen demons. Alison clucked in dismay, and beckoned them to follow her. Colin carried Claire into the house, with Jonathan following behind like a worried duckling.
As soon as Colin stepped through the doorway, he felt peace and stillness descend over him; a nearly imperceptible cessation of the irritating background noise that was the minds and souls of dense-packed humanity resonating through the aethyr that surrounded them. Even Claire seemed eased by it.
“Upstairs,” Alison said.
Between them, Colin and Jonathan carried the unconscious girl up to the guest room where Colin had stayed on his previous visits to Greenhaven. Simon was waiting there, wear
ing the cross, unworldly expression that came from an unexpected late night.
The vigil light was burning on the small altar in the corner—Colin guessed that the Elemental Symbols were Simon’s, as Alison’s Table of Hermes was larger and more formal, kept in the converted garage that she used as her Sanctuary—and the room smelled of cleansing incense.
“Lay her down on the bed,” Alison directed.
Simon moved forward to help them, and soon enough, Claire London was stretched out on the bed. Though the Seal had long since faded, Claire was fairly quiet, protected by Greenhaven’s shielding. Alison knelt beside her, peeling back an eyelid with the brisk efficiency of one who’d had much experience in tending an Adept’s abandoned body while the soul journeyed far into the Astral Realms.
“She’s been drugged,” Alison said shortly. “I was afraid of that—it would take a whole coven to blast her this way through sheer Will. And she’s very weak. Simon, get me my bag.”
The young musician moved to obey.
“Drugged?” stammered Jonathan. He glanced from the small altar to Alison, his face a mask of questions—and faint, incredulous guilt.
“But she … All she—All she had to drink at the party was the punch, Professor. There was just a little vodka in it.”
“She didn’t smoke anything? Take some pills, maybe?” Colin asked, though the pep pills in vogue among the students anxious to be able to pull an all-night study marathon weren’t likely to have this sort of effect, and neither were marijuana or hashish.
“No,” Jonathan said uncertainly.
“Never mind,” Alison said, as Simon returned with her doctor’s bag. “I think I know what it is. It’s dangerous, it’s treacherous, and worst of all—it’s perfectly legal”
She opened the bag and withdrew a hypodermic and a phial of clear fluid. “I’m going to give her a stimulant—as much as I dare—and then Simon and I will try to clear her channels and help her rebuild her natural shields. Is she one of yours, Colin?”
“I never saw her before tonight,” Colin said with complete honesty.
“Too bad,” Alison said. “This would work better if there were someone here that she knew to trust. I don’t have the sense that she’s a very trusting person—and why should she be?”
Alison tapped the syringe to clear it of air bubbles, then slid the needle into the soft skin of the inside of the elbow that Simon had already swabbed clean with alcohol. Slowly she slid the dose into the girl’s vein.
“Professor, what’s going on?” Jonathan demanded. “What are—”
Colin raised his hand for silence. “Quiet, Jonathan. I’ll answer all your questions later, but right now, we need to give Alison and Simon quiet in which to work.”
The two Adepts stood on each side of the single bed, their outstretched arms forming an interwoven bridge above Claire’s supine body. With slow methodical brushing strokes they began working their way down her body, their hands always moving in the same direction, as though they brushed lint from a piece of velvet. They were doing for Claire what she could not do for herself: purging her higher centers of their inadvertent burden of psychic force, and allowing them to close and shield themselves once more.
Colin was no psychic, but years of training enabled him to imagine what they must be seeing: the network of conduits, like the branches of a tree, which made up the channels of energy comprising the Light Body. This etherial self, or Astral Body, was the component of the tripartite Self that clairvoyants used to travel elsewhere in the physical realm and magicians used to journey in the Overworld. It was the Astral Form, or double, that sometimes survived death, wandering the Material Plane after the demise of the body and the departure of the soul, giving rise to tales of ghosts and hauntings from those who chanced to see it.
When they reached her toes, they began again at her head, their gestures broader and more sweeping this time, sending the energy to dissipate into the earth.
Beside him Jonathan watched, fascinated. Colin could tell that the boy was responding to the currents of energy swirling through the room; he’d been right in thinking that Jonathan Ashwell had an aptitude for more than book-learning. Colin would have to be sure to steer the boy clear of table-tippers and other occult quacks, lest he become one of those who founder in the shallows of the Unseen World, enthralled by flotsam.
At last Alison and Simon finished their work, wiping the last of the energy from their hands. Simon looked drained, his face paper white with the effort he had made. Alison, with the benefit of far more years of training and experience, seemed merely tired.
As if from nowhere, one of Alison’s cats materialized and leaped up on the bed, curling up against Claire’s side and purring loudly as it settled down to sleep.
“That’s as much as I can do for her now, Colin; I only hope it’s enough. I’ll come back and check on her in half an hour, though she should sleep straight through till noon tomorrow, if we’re lucky. Just now, I want to talk to you and your young friend,” Alison said meaningfully.
“Well, I’m for bed,” Simon said, running a long elegant hand through his tousled black curls. “I feel as if I could sleep until they blow the Last Trump.” Without another word, he brushed past the others and walked away.
Colin sighed, the nervous energy that had sustained him during the crisis draining away now that everything was all right. It was always like this afterward: the danger-high, and then the low. Adrenaline was surely as much a drug as heroin; did he somehow seek out situations like this to fill his need for it?
“Come on, Jonathan. Claire should be all right, now. And I suppose I owe you an explanation.”
There was a fire burning in the fireplace of the long sitting room, and the spicy scent of eucalyptus logs filled the room. Jonathan collapsed gratefully into a chair, while Alison moved toward the drinks cabinet. Abruptly Colin remembered something.
“Alison, what did you mean when you said, ‘it’s legal’? Do you know what it was? What did Claire take?” Colin asked.
“I’m not completely sure, of course, but I believe she took—or was given without her knowledge—something called lysergic acid diethylamide, a synthetic ergot derivative that’s been around since the forties. Sandoz makes it; it’s used in psychotherapy—in fact, I’ve used it on some of my patients, since it isn’t a restricted drug. It affects the midbrain serotonin receptors—in essence, LSD throws open the doors of perception, short-circuiting the brain’s censoring mechanisms.”
She handed him two fingers of Scotch in a heavy crystal tumbler, and offered the same to Jonathan. Though he was several years below the legal drinking age, the boy accepted the glass gratefully, and Colin couldn’t blame him. It seemed foolish that at eighteen an American was old enough to serve in the military but not to vote, drink alcohol, or sign a binding contract. Matters were arranged differently in Europe.
“A short-circuit … something that could be disastrous for a psychic sensitive,” Colin mused.
“And Claire certainly reacted like one,” Alison said. “The stuff is useful, but pernicious—any home chemist can whip up a batch; it’s colorless, tasteless, and the dose is minuscule; I give it to my patients on a sugar cube, just so we can both keep track of it. It takes effect almost immediately and lasts for up to eighteen hours—and its effect is powerful, unpredictable. We’ll have to hope that your Claire hasn’t been scarred by her experience, but let’s see what she has to say for herself when she wakes up.”
“Is … is Claire a psychic?” Jonathan asked. “A clairvoyant? Can she see the future?”
Alison and Colin glanced at each other. Which of them should field this most elementary and troubling of all questions?
“Claire is certainly what we would term a ‘Sensitive,’” Colin said at last, “in the simplest sense of being one who is ‘sensitive’ to a range of perceptions that come to her on a wavelength that most people are simply not equipped to perceive. As you’ll remember from my lectures, between ten and twenty
percent of all people are born with some sort of psychic faculty, which usually manifests itself in the form of hunches, lucky guesses, prophetic dreams, and the like. Some fraction of that number have a stronger gift—what used to be called ‘Second Sight’ and is now more formally known as clairvoyance and precognition. In them, the Sixth Sense is strong enough that they can manipulate it to some extent, choosing what events distant in space or time they wish to focus on.
“But there is another sort of clairvoyant, the Sensitive, who simply receives more-or-less constant perceptions of the Unseen World. These sensitives quickly learn to block out the flow of frightening unwanted information that no one else seems to perceive. Many of them pass their entire lives without realizing that they are among the gifted.”
“Like Claire,” Jonathan said. “But there’s more to this than that, isn’t there? Professor, I’d swear that Claire didn’t know she was a whatchamacallit. She’s the most practical, down-to-earth girl I know.”
“Being psychic doesn’t necessarily require a person to lose all common sense,” Alison said with a smile. “Thousands of years ago, what was then called the Gift was a prerequisite for rulers and leaders. Civilization wouldn’t have lasted very long if they’d been nothing more than a bunch of colorful eccentrics.”
“I suppose not,” Jonathan said doubtfully. “But Dr. Margrave—if someone is a sensitive, how do they find out about it? What is it like?”
“Now that’s my cue for a very long lecture,” Alison said. “Colin, could you put some more wood on the fire?”
Colin got to his feet and went over to the hearth. The firebox was filled with small logs, a mixture of pale soft eucalyptus wood, grey salt-soaked driftwood, and solid ruddy splits of applewood. He set his drink on the mantelpiece and added several chunks of apple to the fire, wielding the poker to knock down the half-burned pieces and provide a good bed of coals for the new wood. As he waited to be certain that the wood had caught, he glanced toward the large picture window.
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