It had been a harbinger of things to come.
His return to the United States less than forty-eight hours later left Colin MacLaren feeling exhausted and disoriented. Most of that time had been spent in the air: the interminable Atlantic crossing to JFK Airport in New York, then a brief layover and almost eight hours more to San Francisco International. And once he reclaimed his car he faced another two hours’ drive home.
It was October, and so it was raining; the veils of fog so dense over the headlands that the Pan Am flight had almost been forced to divert to another airport. When he’d come down the steps onto the rain-slick tarmac and headed for the terminal, the damp chill of San Francisco had settled over his shoulders like a heavy cloak, and in just that short walk his face was chill and numb.
By the time he reclaimed his car, it was already getting dark. Fortunately the engine started without incident, and soon Colin was driving across the Oakland Bay Bridge toward home.
In the dark, the other cars on the highway seemed like faceless threatening animals, and Colin’s mind turned wearily upon the same fruitless paths. What was he to do about what Dame Ellen had told them? He still had a few contacts from the old days; perhaps he should call someone, investigate to see what corroboration he could dredge up … .
No. The intuition was so sharp and clear-cut that it was impossible to mistake for mere wishful thinking. He had left the Service without ever suspecting it was riddled with double agents and traitors bent on undoing everything he had worked so hard to accomplish, and thus his cover had been perfect. If there was anyone within its ranks still watching him, let them believe he was still blind. A political confrontation was not within his brief.
But now more than ever it was important to be firm in his beliefs; not to compromise, no matter how tempting the offer. Compromise was a slippery slope that led step by reasonable step into darkness and damnation.
When Colin reached the bungalow it was already after seven. He opened the door to the ringing of a telephone—hopeless, insistent. He dropped his suitcase to the rug and rushed over to it, leaving the front door still hanging open.
“MacLaren,” he said—slightly breathlessly—into the receiver.
“Colin! Oh, thank God; I wasn’t sure if you’d gotten back yet. Can you come to the clinic? We have an emergency,” Claire said.
Claire did not ask for help lightly, and the word “emergency” was not often found in her vocabulary. Weary as he was, Colin turned around, got back in his car, and drove to the Bellflower Clinic.
He could hear the screams from the front door; a harsh sound neither human nor animal, but almost machinelike in its monotonous ululation.
“Colin!” Maria said with relief, getting to her feet and coming around the end of the receptionist’s desk to him. Maria was a pretty, petite chicana who was one of the clinic’s few full-time paid staff.
“Thank heaven Claire was able to reach you. Come on.”
Colin followed her almost at a run as she hurried into the back of the clinic, toward the examination rooms. As he did, the mechanical screaming got louder.
“He’s been here since six o’clock this evening. We don’t know what to do with him, and Claire said you’d have some idea. In here,” Maria said. “And I only said I’d stay until you got here, so I’m getting out of here. I don’t want to see anything like that ever again!”
Colin opened the door.
At one point, this had been one of the clinic’s standard examination rooms, with a table, cabinets for supplies, and posters on the walls that explained the symptoms of the most common social diseases and the commonest forms of birth control. But that was before some force had taken the entire contents of the room and shredded them as if it were an enormous Mixmaster.
The examination table had been reduced to kindling, the cabinets battered into a twisted mass. The posters had been shredded, and tiny pieces of paper, like insanely festive confetti, were scattered about the room like snow.
There was a young man crouched in the corner, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. His arms were wrapped around himself, and he rocked back and forth, his face expressionless as he screamed. His face and body were sheened with the sweat of his exertion, but he gave no sign that he knew what he was doing.
Claire was standing in the opposite corner of the room. She was wearing her white nursing uniform with a blue cardigan over it, but her starched white cap was missing and her normally neat hair was in disarray.
Colin stepped into the room as Maria retreated back to her desk. He glanced at his watch. It was 9:30, already half an hour past the clinic’s usual closing time.
“Colin,” Claire said. Her blue eyes had heavy shadows beneath them. “I thought you’d be back today.” She took a deep breath, as if even speech was exhausting. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the screaming.
“He should be in a hospital,” Colin said, nodding at the crouching man. “Bad trip?”
“We think so. Some kind of a voodoo cocktail with Lord knows what in it; an honest tab of windowpane would be a godsend in comparison. His friends dropped him here earlier this evening—just put him out of the car in front of the clinic and drove off. He managed to make it inside and tell us that his name is James Rudbeck and that he’s from Virginia, but we couldn’t get anything more out of him. We brought him in the back and started to examine him, and I guess we found out why his friends dumped him.
“He did this.”
Colin looked around the room again. He didn’t think that any amount of physical strength could have accomplished the destruction he saw here.
“With his mind?” Colin said. Almost unconsciously he had ruled out magick as the source of this disturbance. It would have to be black magic, to cause such harm. Evil had a distinctive signature, and he felt no trace of it here.
“Yes. Every time we try to do anything for him he throws another fit; can you imagine what would happen in a hospital emergency room if that happened? At least we haven’t got much in the way of fancy equipment here. But we haven’t been able to get any tranquilizers into him, or even a saline IV, and that isn’t good.
“Jimmy? Can you hear me?” Claire crossed the room and crouched down in front of the rocking man. She spoke gently, but did not touch him. “Jimmy, it’s Claire. Can you hear me? You’re safe now. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. You took some drugs—do you remember that? And you’re having a bad trip, but it will be over soon. There’s nothing to be afraid of—”
She tried for almost ten minutes, coaxing gently, but without any result. Whatever Rudbeck was seeing within his own mind, whatever had wrenched open the doors of perception to let him reach—and to make him defend himself with—the untapped wells of psychic power inside himself, it was still very much in possession of him.
And even if psychic powers were only manifest in ten percent of the population, and if even only one percent of those had a truly stellar level of power, that still meant hundreds—thousands—of people in California alone with this level of ability. Training could never reach all of them. But mind-expanding drugs could, and did.
Claire sighed, getting to her feet. As she did, she swayed forward, off balance with exhaustion and the awkwardness of her position. As she put out her hand to steady herself against the wall, her wrist brushed Rudbeck’s shoulder.
The contents of the room exploded into life.
Colin didn’t need to see it begin to know what was happening. All the hairs on his body stood straight out with the sudden charge that filled the room. Before he had even decided to move, he’d reached Claire and yanked her to her feet. As the first of the heavy pieces of wood hit the walls, Colin shoved Claire through the door to the examining room and slammed it behind him.
The rattle of debris against the door was like the impact of machine-gun fire.
“And besides,” Claire said, as though finishing a sentence, “he does that every time somebody touches him.” She looked hopefully at Colin. “Kno
w any good exorcists?”
“I used to be a fairly good one myself,” Colin said, “but that isn’t what that boy needs. There’s nothing of the occult here, only the power of the mind.”
“‘Just’ the parapsychological,” Claire said wearily. “Whatever that word means. I don’t think I know anymore. I do know that Jimmy Rudbeck needs help … and if we can’t touch him, we can’t treat him.”
“Claire. Any luck?” Dr. David Soule, the senior member of the staff, came around the corner. His face fell as he heard the battering of the psychic vortex against the closed door. “I guess not. Are you our expert consultant?” he asked hopefully.
“I’m Colin MacLaren,” Colin said. “And I don’t know how much of an expert I am. I’d say that you were more of an expert than I am, except I’m not sure that’s true in this particular case.”
Dr. Soule sighed. “Professor MacLaren, since I stated working here I have seen the dead walk, pigs fly, and a number of things that I would have relegated to the realm of nursery rhymes not two years ago. Nothing in all of God’s creation can possibly surprise me anymore. But how do I treat someone I can’t touch? For bad trips like Rudbeck’s we try to support the patient—give a vitamin shot and maybe a mild sedative, replace fluids, provide a quiet environment for reentry if we can. But we can’t do any of that here. I’ve seen people die of self-induced exhaustion before. I hate to say this, but you’re our last hope.”
As Dr. Soule spoke, the sounds from within the room—other than the robotic screaming, which had almost managed to vanish from Colin’s consciousness—stopped.
Claire sighed, straightening her shoulders with an effort. “There’s my cue, I suppose,” she said. She opened the door cautiously. All was quiet. She stepped inside.
“Let me think for a moment,” Colin said. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead—although as a medical man, I feel duty-bound to advise you to quit. Personally, I’m planning to let overwork kill me,” Dr. Soule said with gallows humor.
Colin retrieved his pipe from a pocket and began to fill it. Tobacco, like alcohol, was a poison—he knew that cigarettes weren’t called “coffin-nails” for no reason. Still, his mind was still half-addled by the long flight, and the tobacco would help him think.
He set the bowl of his pipe alight and smoked in silence for several minutes, mind working furiously.
“Tell me,” Colin said suddenly. “Have you any idea of Rudbeck’s religion? I think I may have a few ideas.”
Dr. Soule frowned. “When we went through his wallet, we found a card for one of the campus Christian Fellowships, and he was wearing a cross when he was brought in, if that’s any help to you.”
“Hm’n,” Colin said, thinking.
James Rudbeck wasn’t possessed by any supernatural entity. A believing Christian, and a devout one, whatever he’d taken had opened some deep-rooted psychic center in his mind and made it a channel for Rudbeck’s darkest fears. It was these he lashed out against, not anything in the material world, but that was small consolation to those who were trying to help him. An exorcism would be of little help in dispelling the force that was destroying him—a force within his own mind, mundane as his own muscles, wielded by some part of his self.
But perhaps, if the boy believed it would work … .
It took all three of them about half an hour to clear the room of debris. Colin had feared that it might not be possible, but Rudbeck seemed to take no notice of anything except of being touched, and all three of them were careful to avoid that. By the time they were finished, there wasn’t so much as a scrap of paper left in the room.
“Now what?” said Dr. Soule.
“Now I’m going to see if I can convince him to stop harming himself. Emptying the room may buy a little time for that,” Colin said, “but make no mistake: I believe that Rudbeck can be just as dangerous when he doesn’t have something to throw.”
“Do you want me there, Colin?” Claire asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Colin said. “I hate to ask you—”
“It’s my job,” Claire said firmly, just as Colin had said to her several years before. “If there’s any way I can help, I have to go.”
Colin nodded, and motioned for Dr. Soule to step back. And then he opened the door to the room again.
Jimmy Rudbeck was still crouched in the corner. His face was sunken in, the skull beneath the skin showing blatantly. Whatever drug he’d taken should be wearing off by now, but that was no guarantee that Jimmy Rudbeck would come down. There were some bad trips that didn’t end. His screams were softer now, only a rusty whistling through his dry throat. He was failing visibly.
If only Colin and Claire could manage to reach him, to help him tell the real from the illusory, that might be enough.
They reached the center of the room.
“James Rudbeck,” Colin said commandingly. “I charge you in the name of the Living God to hear me.”
No response.
“I order the powers of Darkness to depart from you and to leave you in peace. I order it in the Name of the Most High, in whose presence Darkness cannot remain.”
Colin knelt down in front of Rudbeck and clasped him gently by the shoulders to still his rocking.
“Colin,” Claire said, her voice strained.
He felt it, too; the charge of energy that had come just before the room exploded the last time. But this time there was nothing within reach to throw; only the force itself. Colin could feel it pressing on his skin like the anticipation of a storm magnified a thousandfold.
“The Light will always defeat the Darkness. You know that this is true.”
He could feel Claire’s presence behind him, but her gift was in a far different realm than James Rudbeck’s, and it could not match Rudbeck’s in strength. Colin felt a painful spark of discharge energy as Claire put her hand on his shoulder, but he dared not allow himself to be distracted. With all his strength, he willed Rudbeck to believe, to hear him and trust him.
Even if he was no longer certain of his own faith.
Even if he could not believe that the Light would always triumph over the Darkness.
The energy in the room was a painful pressure now, something only instants away from turning on all three of them.
“Jimmy, it’s Claire. You have to let go. You have to let us help you. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. I promise you,” she said from behind Colin’s shoulder.
The tuneless whispered howling stopped.
“ … monsters …” the boy said. His eyes flickered, as if he were trying to look away from some inward vista.
“The Light will always defeat the Darkness,” Colin said firmly. “You know that it’s true. Remember what you know. Say the prayer, Jimmy. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want—’”
The boy’s eyes flickered once more, then closed. He took a ragged breath.
“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—’” Colin said, willing Rudbeck to join him. The boy’s lips moved along with Colin’s words, and slowly the storm he had conjured faded away, dissipating like fog in the sun.
“‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life—’”
And James Rudbeck slumped forward into Colin’s arms in boneless unconsciousness.
Half an hour later there was no sign—save the emptiness of the room—that anything had ever happened there. An ambulance had come to take Rudbeck to the hospital for further treatment, and there was every likelihood that he would remember nothing of what had happened—or at any rate, little enough beyond a resolution not to experiment again with recreational drugs.
As they watched the ambulance pull away, Claire turned to him suddenly with the air of someone who has remembered something.
“Colin? What happened at the hearing?”
The hearing. The disciplinary hearing precipitated by his so-called radicalism. The trip to England and all that had come of it had driven the university problems
completely out of his mind, and somehow now, after all that had happened, he could not manage to still think of it as very important. Colin shook his head.
“I’m afraid they had to proceed without me. No doubt I’ll be notified of their decision in their own good time,” he answered.
But apparently the hearing had been more significant than Colin had thought, and his absence from it had created an unfavorable impression, especially when no explanation of his absence was forthcoming upon his return. An emergency, Colin had said to the colleagues he had gotten to take his classes, and when he returned, he left it at that.
But in the next several days following his return, Colin was summoned to meetings with the head of the Psychology Department, the dean of faculty, the dean of students, and even the president of the university. The message in each of these meetings was the same: drop the parapsychology courses, toe the party line, conform, submit, agree … .
And Colin found himself unable to do it.
More to the point, he didn’t wish to do what they so plainly wanted him to. After what he had learned in London, their concerns seemed petty, somehow; fools dancing on the edge of the Abyss, unaware of the peril they were in, in a world where the sacred cause of human freedom was guttering on the edge of extinction.
He was not, himself, certain of what to do. That power corrupted had always been tacitly understood of those who chose public life, but sheltering and exploiting war criminals went far beyond simple nepotism or self-enrichment. It was betrayal on a cosmic scale, the nihilistic worship of the great god Expediency, reducing the victors to the same moral level as those they had defeated. It was like some horror movie come to life, where friends and allies were transformed into inhuman monsters … and no one knew until it was too late.
Simon had been right. Thorne had been right. Everyone had been right. The United States government—or some powerful faction of it—was so unspeakably corrupt that it was feeding upon itself in a cannibalistic orgy, destroying the very ideals it had been created to protect.
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