Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  When he confronted psychic frauds was the only time I ever saw Colin really lose his temper—not with the cold, furious, sense of purpose I had known him to exhibit so often, but with a roaring Scots rage that thundered like a summons to judgment. There were few people who could stand up to him under those circumstances, and none of the sort that John Dexter so happily called “table-tippers,” in which category John included not only fake mediums and bogus Spiritualists but every form of psychic con and fraud. I do believe that sometimes he deliberately sought those people out and encouraged them to apply to the institute, just for the joy of watching Colin read them out of the book.

  Poor John. Wherever he is now, I wish him eager audiences, and an inspiration that never fades. He was a gallant, fearless soul, taken from us far too soon.

  But that is an old sorrow, and he was certainly there for the first years of Colin’s regime—and I use the term advisedly—acerbic court jester to the reigning lion.

  From the first, Colin had a very definite view of what the institute should be and how he could achieve his vision. He insisted on the strictest code of standards and ethics from all the members of the institute, and even taught a course on occult ethics himself, making it mandatory for all freshmen who wished to enter the parapsychology program. You did not study Parapsychology at Taghkanic without a solid understanding of what Colin MacLaren considered right and wrong.

  What sin he was trying to expiate through this I never knew. It would have been impertinent of me to ask, and unnecessary besides—Colin was always harder on himself than any outsider could ever have been.

  Years passed, and what we asked out of life changed imperceptibly, month by passing month, so that it was only years later that each of us awoke to find ourselves on pathways that I imagine he had looked to follow as little as I had. Had Colin ever expected to be attempting to prescribe the morals of a generation? Yet what was he doing at the Bidney Institute, if not that?

  And as for me …

  In 1976 I was thirty-five. In her thirties, a woman finally escapes the shadow of her childhood and the inevitability of her family’s expectations of her into her own adulthood, becoming at last a person of her own creation.

  Though I had severed ties with my own family long ago, and my adopted family was dead, I carried as much emotional baggage with me as anyone else my age did. More than anything, I think, I had never felt entitled to my own happiness, but 1976 was the year that I finally grew up, and realized that no one was standing in the way of my fulfillment but me.

  For many years my dream had been to own a bookstore, and in that year I opened Inquire Within in Glastonbury, New York.

  I’d decided a long time ago that the sort of bookstore I wanted was called in those days an “occult bookstore,” but I also knew that I didn’t want it to be anything like the Sorcery Shoppe, with its jarsful of dried bats and mummified frogs. I wanted a bookstore that could also be a refuge for seekers as troubled as I had once been.

  It was the worst time in twenty years to start a small business—inflation rates were through the roof and money was tight—but I had my savings and Peter’s insurance and I was determined not to wait any longer to do what I had dreamed of for so long.

  You might say that I chose Glastonbury to be near Colin—and that might be so, for he badly needed friends in those years, but as much as it might have been for that reason, my choice of location was a pragmatic business decision. On the most basic level, I couldn’t possibly have afforded to open an “occult bookstore” in Manhattan—I would have gone broke in a New York minute, as the saying goes. I needed a place where the rents were low but I still had a built-in clientele, and Glastonbury seemed tailor-made for my ambitions.

  What better place than a town near a college that offered a doctorate in Parapsychology? I located an empty store; Colin drafted my labor force from among his students, and in short order, Inquire Within was open for business.

  And I was lucky; the store thrived, and soon I found myself up to my nose in wholesale catalogues, confronting an array of products whose existence I had never even suspected. My favorites were the aerosol cans of Hex Be Gone—brand spray incense and the All-In-One Witch Kits, which guaranteed that they contained everything you needed to become a witch and cast a spell.

  Needless to say, neither object found its way into Inquire Within, though I did stock a small selection of harmless oils, teas, and incenses. But most of all, I stocked books, because what I wanted to provide at Inquire Within was knowledge. Never before—or since, in my opinion—was there such a need for it.

  By the 1970s, spirituality had become a part of the women’s movement, divorced almost completely from its magickal antecedents. Wicca, which in the beginning most people had considered the little sister of Satanism, had prospered as an Earth Religion that owed no debt to Christianity, and which paved the way for other forms of Neo-Paganism.

  It was Goddess worship, not magick, that most of my customers were interested in. Though they weren’t adverse to casting spells, their magick was of the simplest sort. If you had asked any of them to calculate planetary hours or to cast a horoscope to determine the governing angel for their rituals, they would simply have laughed: American efficiency was finally being applied to magick, with admittedly peculiar results.

  Though I was never tempted to give up my own faith, I still saw the feminist witches’ covens and Goddess healing circles as a good thing, a necessary counterbalance to the deeply materialistic currents that were beginning to reshape daily life. Yuppies were replacing yippies, and those who had been on the barricades a few years before were laying away their idealism in lavender and turning to the brutal business of making a living.

  At least, most of them were.

  And then, of course, there was Hunter Greyson … .

  SIXTEEN

  GLASTONBURY, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1979

  How can thine heart be full of the spring?

  A thousand summers are over and dead.

  What hast thou found in the spring to follow?

  What hast thou found in thine heart to sing?

  —ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

  COLIN KNEW HIS INSIGHT HAD BEEN RIGHT—EACH YEAR IT TOOK more effort to ignore the fundamental corruption of the American soul. But it also seemed that the nation was willing to make that effort.

  By the end of the seventies, the citizens of the Woodstock Nation had, for the most part, gone quietly off to brokerages and law firms, exchanged hash pipes for coke spoons, and geared up for a decade-long consumer orgy that would lose its frenetic momentum only with Black Tuesday and the spread of AIDS.

  The last of the sixties idealism had died an ugly death in the Watergate courtrooms, and the grotesque, self-interested end of the Vietnam War in 1975 had put the stone upon its grave. Two failed assassination attempts upon Nixon’s appointed successor, Gerald Ford, less than three weeks apart elicited laughter and jokes when a scant decade before they would have roused horror. It was as if the nation, like a lover betrayed too often, simply refused to care any longer.

  The jingoistic fervor of the Bicentennial festivities in 1976 rang curiously hollow, filled more with a plaintive nostalgia for what once had been than with the spirit of a real celebration of nationhood. That fall, in desperation, the nation elected a largely unqualified fifty-two-year-old Georgia farmer without big-league political experience, the youngest presidential candidate since Kennedy, to the highest office in the land. Gerald Ford, who had once served on the Warren Commission, and who would be known forever as “the man who pardoned Nixon,” disappeared from the political scene without a trace. Jimmy Carter would follow him into political obscurity one term later, having pardoned the draft dodgers, given away the Panama Canal, received a Pope on American soil, and provided the nation with a 23% inflation rate.

  People wanted to believe in something—they were desperate for truths—but on every side they were presented with the dangers of faith. The Reverend Jim Jones led
his People’s Temple followers into death in a mass suicide in Guyana, and in Iran, the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to power led to theocratic totalitarianism and the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran. Sixty-three Americans were held hostage by “students,” and all America’s military-industrial clout was not enough to bring them home.

  And worst of all, everything seemed to be some kind of unfunny joke.

  I wonder if I’m getting too old for this? Colin MacLaren wondered to himself. It was a rhetorical question; he’d never felt more vital, more in control of his destiny. After six years the institute was on a firm footing at last, the first wave of the new doctoral program was about to graduate, and Taghkanic had even backed off a bit in its eternal attempt to annex the institute’s operating budget. With President Quiller’s retirement last year, a new period of harmonious cooperation seemed to have dawned for the Bidney Institute.

  He glanced around his office. For a moment, his gaze lingered on cherished mementoes: a picture of the front of Claire’s bookstore; a photo of Barbara and Jamie Melford with their two children, John Colin and Margaret Claire; an old photo of Colin standing in front of his college at Oxford; another of him standing with Claire in Golden Gate Park. Moments snatched out of the rushing current of time, now forever inviolate. Enough such moments, and the shape of a life was marked out for all to see.

  The interoffice phone buzzed; Colin plucked the receiver deftly out of a nest formed by stacks of journals and raised it to his ear.

  “Colin, you told me to buzz you at one-forty-five,” his secretary said. “You’ve got Welcome to the Twilight Zone at two.”

  “Thanks, Christie. I’ll be there,” he answered, a smile in his voice.

  The Lookerman Auditorium was almost a quarter full when Colin entered. It was a grandly rococo building, named for the college’s founder, Jurgen Lookerman, and looked like a Viennese opera house in miniature; a fact that the Drama Department found ideal for the staging of its various productions throughout the year.

  Today a podium with microphone had been placed at the center edge of the half-round stage. Several dozen students, a significant fraction of Taghkanic’s student body, were waiting for him—this year, for a miracle, all down in front instead of hiding in the shadows at the back of the auditorium. As Colin took the stage, he saw Dylan and Cassie and several others that he recognized from summer interviews.

  To attend the Taghkanic’s degree-track parapsychology classes (all taught by staff of the Bidney Institute), a student had to have taken Introduction to Occult Ethics during their freshman year and have had a personal interview with Colin before the start of their sophomore year. Fortunately this summer’s interviews had been profitable, turning up two particularly promising candidates.

  Dylan Palmer was frank about his interest in ghosts—and equally frank about his desire to integrate this rowdy and disreputable stepchild of parapsychology into a classical scientific framework. His eventual ambition was to teach, and Colin thought he’d be good at it. Though he was barely twenty, Dylan’s open-minded willingness to know made him a good candidate for survival in a field where cherished theories could be disproved in a heartbeat and researchers frequently had to resign themselves to a lifetime’s equivocation.

  Cassilda Chandler, on the other hand, was outspokenly mystical—an “old soul,” some of Colin’s counterparts would have called her. She wanted all the tools that science could arm her with, but her interest lay in discovering the extent of the Unseen World by any means she could employ. Cassie was very much the sort of student that Colin wanted the institute’s Taghkanic-sponsored degree program to attract: young questioning minds that he could guide past the many pitfalls that the study of the Unseen World entailed.

  Colin knew that if the institute were to move into the twenty-first century, he was going to have to find and train the next generation of parapsychology researchers himself, and so, in a sense, he was actively recruiting students to the degree program. In order to avoid answering the same questions over and over individually, Colin had arranged to add this lecture to the Orientation Week schedule. Though anyone was welcome to attend, his usual audience was incoming freshmen and a few curious sophomores.

  “Good afternoon. My name is Colin MacLaren, and I’m the director of the Margaret Beresford Bidney Memorial Institute for Psychic Research.”

  Scattered laughter at the institute’s full unwieldy name.

  “I know that many of you will be curious about what we do here, and in the course of your enrollment here at Taghkanic, many of you will participate in the institute’s research as volunteers, while some of you will choose to make parapsychology your field of study. Perhaps some of you will have chosen Taghkanic for just that reason.

  “I’d like to begin by mentioning what the institute is not—it is not in the business of promulgating any particular creed or doctrine, nor is it engaged in the practice of any form of religion. Parapsychology is a young science—”

  As he went on with the introductory lecture—covering only the most rudimentary outline of the subject—Colin allowed his gaze to roam over his audience. They were universally long-haired and denim-clad, some listening raptly, some already trying to come up with embarrassing questions to trap him with later.

  As he continued, explaining that parapsychology was not something supernatural, but in fact a normal—though rare—part of the natural world, he noticed that someone else had come in. He—Colin was guessing about the newcomer’s gender—was wearing a white buckskin jacket that glowed almost supernaturally in the gloom of the back of the auditorium. As Colin glanced at him, he felt a sudden flash of akashic memory; a sense of recognition. Here was one whom he’d known once, and would know again.

  He put the distraction from him firmly. If the two of them were meant to know one another, they would not be able to avoid doing so—it was not for Colin to force the Unseen Hand or tell others the truths they had chosen to put aside in this life. He spoke for another fifteen minutes, and then opened the floor to questions.

  “You’ve said that parapsychology isn’t the occult,” a girl sitting in the front row said. “But aren’t you studying the occult?”

  “In part,” Colin said. “What we today refer to as ‘the occult’ preceded the development of parapsychology by several thousand years, just as church exorcism preceded a knowledge of mental illness. The word ‘occult’ only means ‘hidden’; it comes from the same Latin root as ‘oculist,’ and physicians still speak of testing for ‘occult’ blood and mean nothing magical by it, I assure you. Much of what we today dismiss as folklore and magick came into existence when people misapplied cause and effect relationships or misinterpreted what they saw in the natural world. One of the goals of the Bidney Institute’s work is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to decide what part of this inheritance has value to the modern world.”

  “Professor MacLaren?” A boy this time, almost painfully neat in corduroy jacket, creased jeans, and Hush Puppies. “Do you mean that there is magic?”

  “I’m afraid I have to beg the question, as we first have to define ‘magic.’ If you mean the rabbit-from-a-hat, stage illusionism variety, it’s alive and well, but it’s not something we teach at Taghkanic or study at the institute. If you mean comic-book hocus-pocus, then I’d have to say I’ve never seen any.”

  “What about the art of making changes to the nature of reality in accordance with the will?” a new voice asked. “Do you believe in magick-with-a-K, Dr. MacLaren?”

  It was the young man at the back of the auditorium, and he’d quoted the classical definition of true magick as proposed by the great twentieth-century magician Aleister Crowley.

  “If that is how you define magic,” Colin answered honestly, “then, yes, I do believe in magic. Come down and sit in the front, please; I don’t like to shout. What’s your name?”

  “Hunter Greyson,” the young man said, moving down to the front of the auditorium. His pale hair was just past
shoulder length. “I’m a transfer from SUNY New Paltz.”

  “Next time, don’t be late,” Colin cautioned, and went on to the next question.

  There were no more surprises in the question-and-answer period, and it wound up right on schedule. The usual students hung back to ask one last question; predictably enough, Hunter Greyson was among them, though he waited until all the others had drifted away.

  “I was hoping you could help me out,” Greyson said. “I wanted to take some of the advanced courses, but they said over at registration that I had to have your signature.”

  Greyson smiled winningly. He had an easy charm, and the particular sort of confidence that sprang from a young lifetime’s experience of being able to talk his way into—or out of—anything.

  The ghosts of knowledge he should not have stirred beneath the surface of his mind—which of Colin’s beloved dead stood before him now in new flesh? “They were right,” Colin said.

  He took the list of courses from the boy’s hand and scanned it. “You do need my signature. You also need a personal interview with me and a passing grade in Occult Ethics and Practices.”

  There was a pause as Colin saw Hunter Greyson digest both this information and his manner and retrench accordingly.

  “Well, I’m a transfer student, so I haven’t taken the course yet. I’m pretty well read, though; if I can’t test out of it I was hoping I could maybe take it along with the others … ?”

  The next batch of students was already filing into the auditorium. During Orientation Week, the scheduling in Lookerman was tight.

  “I have a meeting at three, Mr. Greyson, and we’re not wanted here. Why don’t you walk over to my office with me and we can finish our discussion?”