Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Why, it’s dear old Professor MacLaren,” Toller Hasloch said gaily. “What an unexpected privilege it is to see you again.”

  The years from twenty-three to thirty-four had been generous to Hasloch. His hair, though it brushed his shoulders in the current style, was no unkempt hippie mass, but an expensive Sassoon cut. His black polo coat was open over a double-breasted pin-striped suit with extravagant lapels; the silk pocket-square and fashionably wide tie were a bright Peter Max print and the deeply cuffed bell-bottoms broke over gleaming boots with high stacked heels.

  “I wouldn’t call it a privilege in your position,” Colin said. “Still, I suppose tastes differ. You’ve done well for yourself, haven’t you? I see you’ve sold out to the Establishment.”

  Hasloch smiled, an expression as cold and false as the man himself.

  “Professor MacLaren, I never intended to challenge the Establishment. I have always intended to suborn it, and then place it in service to the eternal Reich. It’s remarkably easy once you’ve begun, so I find.”

  “It sounds like a full-time job,” Colin commented calmly. “I suppose I had better let you get back to it.”

  “We’ll meet again,” Hasloch vowed. He turned to go, then stopped. “I suppose I ought to be coy in the best movie villain fashion and ask if you’ve read any good books lately, but you strike me as such an unlikely candidate for the role of James Bond that I can’t bring myself to do it. I should mention, though, that if you’re looking for Walter, I’m afraid he’s out. But do feel more than welcome to call another day.”

  He knows about the manuscript. He’s baiting you. Don’t react, Colin told himself.

  “Yes,” Hasloch said, as if Colin had spoken. “I’m in this John Cannon business up to the eyes. Walter’s one of mine. Every single one of those pathetic anti-Church reactionaries is mine—and there’s nothing that you, with your precious White Light scruples, can do about it.

  “It’s quite amusing, really. They think they’re rebelling, but they’re still celebrating the Big Lie of the Jew-inspired Roman Church, even in their trivial blasphemies.”

  “I do wonder why you put up with it,” Colin said commiseratingly.

  Hasloch threw back his head and laughed.

  “Because there’s power there, my dear monk! Anywhere there is fear or hatred there is power that feeds the Aeonic Current. But acquit me of being anything so inconsequential as a Satanist—this is simply another mask for me, a diversion until the time for masks is over. And do go on with your pathetic and useless crusade,” Hasloch said amiably. “You’ve put so many obstacles in your own way, you’ll never prevail.”

  In one thing, Colin thought to himself grimly, Hasloch had not changed. He still talked too much, though in one sense he was right—the actions which Colin could take and remain of the Light were much more circumscribed than those available to the Shadow. To lose patience with that fact, to use the methods of the Serpent, was to fall to the Shadow and become its tool, witting or not.

  “And do have a Merry Christmas, Professor.” Hasloch turned away and climbed into his car. A moment later it was moving quietly up the street, white clouds of steam billowing from its exhaust.

  Colin watched until the car was out of sight, and then went up the steps to ring Mansell’s bell. There was no answer, not that he had truly expected any. The encounter he had been drawn to here in Brooklyn had been with Hasloch, not with Mansell. And a challenge had been offered—and answered.

  The odds seemed insurmountable, the contest unwinnable, but all of Colin’s life had been spent waging just such a war. The first victory must be over the Self, to gain the tools for all that followed. It was a battle that must constantly be refought, but each time he conquered his own impatience and despair, something far greater than himself had won a victory, and Colin became stronger.

  And so as it had been, it must be now.

  Colin walked slowly back to his van. His first stratagem had been blocked; there was no point in approaching Mansell now. He would try another approach.

  Preoccupied with his thoughts—any day which included Alan Daggonet, Father Godwin, and Toller Hasloch had to be considered an exceptionally full one—Colin nearly forgot that there was one last task for him to perform.

  “Claire? It’s Colin. I’m sorry it’s late, but I just got in. Did you manage to track down that hunch of yours? No? Well, then, there’s a doctor’s office on Park in the Eighties that I think might be the place you’re looking for. Maybe you should see if they need a temp … .”

  Friday, December 23, was cold and bright. Colin’s destination was One Police Plaza, where Lieutenant Martin Becket and the Occult Crimes Unit had a small office tucked away in a corner of the sprawling maze of police headquarters.

  The building was located near city hall in what had been, almost a century before, the heart of Manhattan. In the years since, the city had spread, its center moving uptown with the skyscrapers that lined Madison, Fifth, and Sixth, and with the great public spaces such as Rockefeller Center that had been created half a hundred blocks north. Downtown—its concrete canyons in shadow on even the brightest summer day—had been left to the wizards of Wall Street and to various municipal offices, such as the one its inmates called, with varying degrees of affection, the Puzzle Palace.

  A uniformed policewoman ushered Colin to Becket’s door and tapped on the glass. Becket looked up, waved at Colin through the glass, and the woman withdrew.

  Colin opened the door and went in.

  Detective Lieutenant Martin Becket, like most of his real-life brethren, was a middle-aged sedentary man with a receding hairline and a chain-smoking habit he tried intermittently to break. He had a wife, three kids, and a house in Queens. Only the .38 revolver in the black shoulder holster that he wore—visible, as his blue plaid sport coat was hung on the coat tree that teetered in the corner of the office—and the gold shield clipped to his belt distinguished him from thousands of other office workers in a thousand anonymous office buildings all over Manhattan.

  “Merry Christmas, Colin! Nice of you to drop by,” he said, waving Colin to a chair. “I suppose it’s too much to hope for that you’ve come to crack my big case?”

  “Sorry,” Colin said, moving a pile of reports off the chair and seating himself in it.

  Becket fired up another Camel and offered Colin the pack. Colin waved it aside; he’d managed to wean himself down to an occasional pipe, and lately he was starting to think he should give even that up.

  “So. You didn’t come in just to pass the time of day,” Becket said. “There’s a limit to how long I’m going to be able to sit on this Jacquet thing—though the holiday helps—and if the ME’s office ever lets some of the details slip to the press, I’d better be ready with the perp’s head on a platter or the mayor’s office is going to be asking for mine.”

  The Occult Crimes Unit was only a small part of Becket’s workload. It was primarily for information sharing and resource development, and the possibility for negative publicity ensured that it kept a very low profile. The Sandra Jacquet murder, however, might just be the one that blew the lid off the unit once and for all, and Becket was justifiably worried about the repercussions.

  “Then I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you, Marty,” Colin said. “The good news is, I’ve got a pretty good idea of who killed her—it’s a group—and I’ve got the name and address of one of them. The bad news is, I haven’t got a blessed shred of proof. One of the people who could make the connection died two days ago of allegedly natural causes, and I don’t think Lucille Thibodeaux will testify.”

  “Neither do I,” Becket said dryly. “They fished her out of the river this morning—suicide, the coroner’s office says. I’d flagged her file, so they gave me a call.”

  “Poor soul,” Colin said softly.

  “You said you had a name for me?” Becket asked.

  “Walter Mansell, currently living in Flatbush. He’s in the phone book, but I’ll
give you his address. He’s a defrocked Catholic priest. I checked with a friend of mine in the diocese: he was also excommunicated for heresy.”

  “Sounds like a model citizen so far. Not many people go to the trouble of getting themselves excommunicated these days,” Becket commented. “So how do you connect him up with Jacquet?”

  “John Cannon mentioned the name in a phone call to me the night before he died,” Colin said. “According to Lucille, she was pretty forthcoming with Cannon when he interviewed her, and passed on names that Sandra had given her. Cannon said that Mansell had tried to recruit him for the group when he got in touch with them.”

  “So Thibodeaux—who’s dead—dropped the dime on Mansell to Cannon—who’s also dead. Nice. But it isn’t,” Becket sighed, “anything we can go within twenty blocks of the DA with. Still, it’s always good to make new friends. I’ll keep an eye out for our friend Walter.”

  “While you’re opening new dossiers, try this: before he died, Cannon turned in his finished book about Satanism in New York to his editor, Jamie Melford of Blackcock Books. When I spoke to Cannon, he implied that he was receiving threats and pressure to withdraw the book. Melford’s office was broken into and vandalized after Cannon’s death and his copy of the manuscript stolen. It looks like Melford’s starting to get the same treatment that Cannon got.”

  “Did he swear out a complaint?” Becket asked, suddenly more alert.

  “He said the police were in about the break-in. I doubt he knows anything about Mansell, unless Cannon used his name in the book.” But if he had, Cannon would know he’d be opening himself to an action for libel, and the old pro would have been too cautious for that.

  Unless, of course, he’d named names as a form of insurance, expecting to be able to go back and delete them later.

  “I hope you’re going to tell me you’ve stayed away from Mansell,” Becket said, lighting another Camel from the stub of the first.

  “I haven’t spoken to him,” Colin said truthfully. He thought about Toller Hasloch, but said nothing. He had no proof, other than Hasloch’s own word, that he was involved with the Satanists … and he would have to be far more foolish than he was to trust Hasloch’s word even for the fact that the sun would rise tomorrow.

  “Well, it’s a start, anyway. I’ll shoot Mansell’s name down to Files and see what comes back. If he’s got any priors—including littering—we can pull him in and see what we get with a fishing expedition. It’d be nice if we had the contents of Jacquet’s apartment to work from, but somebody torched it the night she disappeared. Arson.”

  Colin sighed, getting to his feet. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

  “Well,” Becket said, “at least now we know all these folks are connected. If there do have to be a bunch of kooks out there pretending they’re witches, it helps that they all know each other.”

  THIRTEEN

  NEW YORK, DECEMBER 24, 1972

  I have owed to them,

  In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

  Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

  And passing even into my purer mind,

  With tranquil restoration:

  —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  CLAIRE MOFFAT SAT BEHIND THE RECEPTIONIST’S DESK IN DR. Marian Clinton’s office, as band-box perfect as the day she’d graduated from nursing school—which was more years ago than a woman was supposed to like to remember, these days. She fanned herself idly with an empty manila folder; Marian Clinton kept her office uncomfortably warm, although Claire supposed that all the women who undressed in her examining room throughout the day were grateful for the heat.

  It was too bad none of them were here to appreciate it—Dr. Clinton had been forced to cancel her morning appointments when one of her patients had gone into labor early, and Claire was alone in the office. She spared a moment’s sympathy for the new arrival, afflicted with a December 24 birthday. Oh, well. There were worse fates than to be born happy, healthy, and wanted.

  She tried not to wonder what she was doing here. On the surface, the answer was simple enough: the temporary agency she listed with had placed her here when she’d called them yesterday and said she was available to work today. On another level, Claire was here because Colin had called her last night and asked her to find some way to be at this address today. There were times when that RN came in very handy—a nursing degree was almost as good as a passport for getting you into odd places at short notice.

  And on the deepest level of all, she was here because for years she had made herself the hands of a Power that moved through the world, and done its bidding without asking why. She did not know what happened to those whose lives she touched, or why she was drawn to them and not to any of the others who suffered daily in the world. She could not believe that some were more deserving of succor than others. In Claire’s belief, all who suffered were equally worthy of aid—and the question of why some received it and some did not had troubled her ever since she had committed her heart to this path.

  Why should Peter have died and his killer lived on in jail? Why should her Gift not have been able to save the man she’d loved so deeply? What Purpose directed her Gift as it did, and to what end?

  There was no answer, nor did she expect one, but Claire was too much a child of her generation to feel that blind submission and unquestioning acceptance could ever be a virtue. She might never receive an answer to her questions, but she certainly wasn’t going to beat herself up over the fact that she asked them.

  And despite the fact that it had been Colin who had directed her here, Claire had the odd sense that she would have been drawn here anyway, compelled here by the cryptic force that so influenced her reality.

  It was early afternoon. Dr. Clinton had come back from the hospital, and Claire had just ushered Dr. Clinton’s one o’clock into the examining room when Claire heard what sounded like heartbroken weeping coming from the hallway outside the office. She was already heading for the door—propped open with a brick to afford her some relief from the heat—when she realized that the sound she heard so clearly was not audible to anyone else.

  She opened the door and saw a slender woman a few inches shorter than she was standing in the hall, hesitating between the door to Dr. Clinton’s office and that of Alexander Wynitch across the way. The woman’s dark hair was cut short and topped with a snow-spangled tartan tam. She was wearing a Navy peacoat barely shorter than her skirt and a pair of brown leather boots, and as Claire watched, she took a hesitant step toward Wynitch’s door.

  Claire wrinkled her nose: Wynitch was one of the pseudo-professionals who infested the field of psychology, and Claire was willing to bet that any certification the man possessed had come out of a box of Cracker Jack.

  “Were you looking for Dr. Clinton’s office?” Claire asked hopefully.

  The woman spun around and stared at Claire with a wild expression on her face, and Claire felt an uprush of instinctive sympathy. She did not know whether this was the woman she had been sent to aid, but this was certainly a woman in need of her help.

  Speaking soothingly, she got the stranger to come into Dr. Clinton’s waiting room and drink a cup of water from the cooler. It took all her professional composure not to react when the woman introduced herself: Barbara Melford.

  And Colin told me that Cannon’s editor was named Jamie Melford! This can’t be a coincidence.

  Because there were no coincidences—Colin had told her that, often enough. Those were words he lived by—no coincidences, only a Pattern too vast for them to see, whose weave they could make or mar of their own will.

  Under a little gentle coaxing, Barbara Melford told Claire a confused story of fighting with her mother-in-law, of doing things she could not account for, of feeling that she was losing her mind, that made Claire’s heart ache with informed sympathy. Barbara’s mother-in-law was set on having her see Mr. Wynitch, and Claire was equally set that she should not.

  She did not want to say any
thing that would make her sound eccentric—by the look of her, Barbara Melford had just about had her fill of strangeness. She did not know precisely what she said, only that she convinced Barbara to see Dr. Clinton before she did anything else.

  And then, using all her guile, Claire extracted a promise from Barbara to come with her to see Colin after Dr. Clinton’s office closed for the day.

  She was glad that she had when Barbara came walking out of Dr. Clinton’s consulting room a few minutes later, as stiff-legged and glassy-eyed as if she’d just been given a death sentence. Claire called out to her as she passed, but Barbara didn’t really seem to hear her.

  Don’t push. An inner urging kept Claire seated as Barbara mechanically collected her coat and hat and sleepwalked out of the office. After working so hard to get the job, Claire couldn’t simply walk—or run—out in the middle of it.

  She’s agreed to meet me in front of Lord & Taylor’s at three—I hope she remembers, Claire fretted. But that matter had been taken out of her hands.

  Barbara had remembered—or at least, some good angel had brought her to their rendezvous at the appointed time. The sidewalk was choked with tourists come to view Lord & Taylor’s famous Christmas windows, but Barbara stood staring out into the street, looking like a lost child.

  With the firm decisiveness learned from years of nursing, Claire took charge of Barbara Melford and got them both into a cab. Barbara sat silent throughout the short cab ride downtown, as if she were hoarding her strength for one last effort soon to come.

  When the two women arrived at Colin’s apartment, Claire discovered that things stood much as she’d guessed they did. Barbara Melford was the wife of Cannon’s editor and suffering persecution of her own to bring pressure on her husband. As Claire brewed tea and sliced the fruitcake she had brought over only a few days ago—Colin had a pernicious sweet tooth, and she was glad to see that there was some of it left—Barbara explained everything that had begun when Cannon had brought the manuscript to Jamie, including the fact that Dr. Clinton had told her that she was being poisoned with ergot—probably by someone very close to her.