Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Rainbow said the new tenants are all moved in to Alison’s house—I suppose we’re going to have to stop calling it that eventually, but it is hard—as of last week. Not a family; a woman and her sister. The woman is some kind of counselor—I think she stopped into the shop a few months back, but I couldn’t say for sure—she’s running a practice out of the house. The sister’s a music student at the conservatory. Rainbow said she’ll be bringing the younger sister with her tonight, so we’ll get to meet her.”

  “Is the girl interested in Spiritualism?” Colin asked curiously. It wasn’t a path that attracted many young people, at least in urban areas like the San Francisco Bay Area.

  “No,” Claire admitted. “But she’s young, and curious, and interested in making new friends. Apparently she’s already made quite a hit with Frodo.”

  “Well, that’s a point in her favor, certainly,” Colin said. He picked up the heavy percolator filled with water and carried it over to the table. They’d plug it in later, just before the first medium began to sit. “I’m looking forward—”

  The doorbell chimed.

  “Someone must be here. I’ll get it,” Claire said, wiping her hands clean on a towel.

  “Colin, this is Emily Barnes. Her sister Leslie has just bought Greenhaven,” Claire said.

  Emily Barnes was a tall slender teenager with the grace of a black swan. The way she held herself bespoke years of training in classical dance, but Claire had said she was studying music. Rainbow and Frodo were with her, along with a couple of the other local Wiccans.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Emily. I’m Colin MacLaren.” He held out his hand, and Emily took it, with the caution of one whose art was concentrated in her hands. He shook it gently, and saw her relax.

  “Hello,” Emily said shyly. The light of an old soul shone from her dark eyes, but Colin did not sense any Call to awaken it.

  Emily’s eyes flickered from Colin to Claire, and widened slightly at the sight of the store. “Wow! You’ve got more books than my sister does.”

  “We try to sell them,” Colin said, smiling. “But they keep piling up.” Another knot of people gathered at the door, and Colin moved away to open it.

  Kathleen Carmody entered with another woman—apparently the other medium for tonight’s séance.

  Colin had known Kathleen and Edward for a long time, having come into their lives on an occasion when a legacy from a distant relative had brought with it a good deal more trouble than anyone could have expected. It was then that Kathleen had discovered her gifts as a psychic, and she and Edward had gone on to work closely with Alison in the last years of the older woman’s life.

  “Hello, Colin. This is Rhonda Quentin.”

  Ms. Quentin wore a voluminous Egyptian-print caftan and a great deal of jewelry, including a six-inch-long quartz crystal pendant carved artificially into a point. Her eyelids were painted a deep bruise-purple from lashes to browline. She was several years older than Kathleen—in her late fifties, Colin would hazard.

  “Ah, you are the friend of whom Kathleen has told me so much,” Ms. Quentin declaimed in a throaty voice. “I see that you are an old soul, who has trod the Path through many more lives than this. But your aura seems somehow clouded—” She put her hand to her forehead in a theatrical gesture.

  Colin pegged her as a harmless crank—who might even actually be psychic. That particular ability, like a gift for singing or sharp eyesight, carried with it no particular guarantee of mental stability or even common sense.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Ms. Quentin. All legitimate followers of the Path are welcome here,” Colin said tactfully. He turned away to greet another guest, and out of the corner of his eye saw Kathleen turn to Rhonda Quentin and begin whispering to her.

  Kathleen worked first, sliding quickly and untheatrically into a trance state and reaching those on the “other side” whose message she had to convey. To Colin’s surprise, there was a message for Emily Barnes from her grandmother, but it was something essentially harmless, and the girl did not seem upset by it.

  Kathleen worked in a very modern style; though she asked the sitters for quiet and to place their hands upon the table, she did not dim the lights nor engage in any prayers or exhortations. She also dispensed with the embarrassingly-implausible spirit guides that characterized both previous generations of mediums and that New Age phenomenon, the “channeler.”

  While it was true that “spirit guides” were only another mask for the self—the ritual magician often encouraged the division of his personality into various magickal “personas” which could perform the tasks he set them without the additional burden of twentieth-century rationalism—it was one that had led to much ridicule and misunderstanding over the years.

  When her turn came, however, Ms. Quentin proved to be a medium in the grand old tradition. She’d arrived carrying a large carpetbag, out of which she drew a large pillar candle and a heavy brass ashtray into which she placed several pieces of cone incense.

  “It clears the vibrations, my dears. So much unhappiness in this world is due to blocked or clogged auras,” she pronounced grandly.

  About half the people here tonight were older women, with short permed hair and strings of beads around their necks. They nodded, agreeing with her, while the younger ones—and even in her late forties, Kathleen Carmody was one of them—looked pained and politely noncommittal.

  Colin glanced at Claire. She had the expression of a woman who has bitten into a very sour lemon and is doing her best not to show it.

  So she suspects as much as I do, Colin thought wryly. Well, let’s see if Ms. Quentin has anything novel in her bag of tricks.

  For several minutes the older medium bustled about the table, rearranging her audience for “proper energonic flow.” Colin wasn’t surprised to have been seated as far away from her as possible, with Claire a couple of seats to his right. Kathleen must have warned the woman that Colin didn’t tolerate frauds here; he hoped she’d heeded the warning.

  The medium lit the candle and the incense, then turned out all the lights, requested everyone to clasp hands tightly, and led the group in several rather Christian prayers.

  This didn’t go down too well with the Wiccans there; Rainbow looked rather embarrassed, Frodo determinedly polite, and Emily Barnes looked actively stricken, much as if she’d been suddenly called upon to handle live snakes. In the eighties, “freedom of religion” seemed to have become “freedom from religion” for many people; the girl might well never have been in a synagogue, mosque, temple, or church in her entire life.

  Ms. Quentin entered trance with a great deal of moaning and head-rolling, and then produced a spirit guide named Yellow Bear.

  Moving slowly, Colin brought the hands of the people on either side of him toward each other. When Ms. Quentin had asked them all to clasp hands, he’d kept his hands close together in front of him, precisely so he could do this.

  Without demur, the people on either side of him clasped hands, their whole attention caught by the dialogue between Ms. Quentin and Yellow Bear that was taking place at the top of the table. Moving as noiselessly as possible, Colin crept, crouching, to the back of the room—and waited.

  As he’d expected, soon Ms. Quentin began to emit faintly glowing streams of ectoplasm, that material every good medium was supposed to be able to generate at will from her own body, in order to form actual shapes of the dear departed. Ms. Quentin was putting on quite a show, and Colin could feel the level of tension in the room rise expectantly.

  He turned on the lights.

  Ms. Quentin screamed.

  In the glare of the harsh overhead florescents, a length of sheer fabric daubed with luminous paint could plainly be seen. It was suspended in the air by an ingenious mechanism composed of thin bamboo strips which Ms. Quentin held between her toes.

  “She’s a fake!” Emily Barnes burst out, and then began to giggle in nervous relief. Several of the others joined her.

  The lat
tice of bamboo strips clattered to the floor. In the open carpetbag beside Ms. Quentin’s chair, Colin glimpsed the rest of the paraphernalia of the fraud psychic: several different bells, a clicker, a length of rope, and a small stoppered bottle containing a fine granulated powder.

  Ms. Quentin burst into tears. “No! You don’t understand! It’s real! It’s all real!”

  “Oh, Ronnie,” Kathleen Carmody said reproachfully. “I trusted you!”

  “Why don’t we all go get something to drink?” Frodo suggested, practical and businesslike. He put a hand under Emily’s elbow, steering her toward the other room. Most of the others, as embarrassed to have witnessed the bogus medium’s unveiling as she’d been to be exposed, followed them.

  Claire moved to the head of the table, to where Ms. Quentin crouched, weeping, her hands over her eyes.

  “There, there, dear,” Claire said, motherly and practical. “You must have known you’d be caught sooner or later. Here’s my hankie. Now put on your shoes, and have a nice cup of coffee. And I think you ought to apologize to all these people.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Ms. Quentin said belligerently, still weeping. Her mascara made muddy tracks down cheeks soft and seamed with age, and wiping at it with Claire’s soft linen pocket square only made matters worse. “The Astral Plane is real—it is—but people aren’t content with that. They want signs and wonders.”

  “But you can’t give them to them, you know,” Claire said, still soothingly. “Not by trickery. It’s wrong. Not everyone is a materializing medium, and you must never pretend to carry messages from Beyond that you haven’t received. Who knows what mischief you might do? Come on now; why don’t you wash up and put on some fresh lipstick? You’ll feel ever so much better.”

  Ms. Quentin nodded, and Claire put an arm around her shoulders to help her to her feet. But just as she straightened, the woman’s knees buckled under her, and Claire sagged under her weight.

  Colin rushed to help.

  “She’s out cold—and she’s not faking,” Claire decided, as Colin helped lower her to the floor again. “Best to let her come around naturally—I’ll go get a blanket.”

  Colin took off his jacket and bundled it into a pillow to place beneath her head. As he did, he realized that behind closed lids, the medium’s eyes were darting back and forth, as if she were deep in REM-sleep. He took her hand, disturbed.

  “Don’t—” the voice that forced itself from Ms. Quentin’s throat was hoarse and masculine, oddly familiar. “Don’t—”

  Colin leaned forward. Was she dreaming? Faking? Or was this a true trance?

  “Don’t let me—” The voice broke off, and there was a confusion of sound, as though several people were talking at once.

  “Who are you?” Colin asked. “What do you want?”

  Ms. Quentin’s eyelids fluttered; she awoke as if she’d been asleep.

  “What?” she said, struggling to get up. “What’s going on?”

  Though she’d certainly been faking earlier, what had come after she fainted—of which she had no memory—was undoubtedly genuine. Ms. Quentin belonged to that class of psychics who had genuine powers but resorted to trickery on those all-too-frequent occasions when the Gift would not present itself. Colin would not be foolish enough to disregard her message, mystifying as it was.

  It was a cry for help—but from whom?

  A couple of weeks later Claire was replacing the books on one of the high shelves. Most of the browsers at the bookshop had the usual tendency to replace the books wherever was convenient, rather than where they belonged, and after a few weeks of that, it was difficult to find anything. The weather had settled into the endless string of fair temperate days that marks a California summer, and the air this close to the ceiling was stifling. It was a relief when she heard Colin summoning her from the front of the store.

  “Claire? I think this must be the lady you mentioned to me.”

  Claire hurried down the ladder and came out to the desk. A dark-haired woman was standing in front of the counter, talking to Colin. She bore a certain resemblance to Emily Barnes, but where Emily possessed the gawky ethereality of youth, this woman was definitely a grown-up. Claire recognized her from their previous meeting.

  “Dr. Barnes, is it?” Colin asked. “I heard that you had moved into a house which once belonged to our dear friend Alison Margrave.”

  Claire saw how Leslie Barnes shied away from the mention of Alison’s name, as though it held no good associations for her.

  “The book you gave me on poltergeists contained the only sensible thing I’ve ever read about them. I came back to see if you had anything else,” Leslie said to Claire.

  “I’ll start you with the Anstey and Margrave monograph,” Claire answered. They’d been out of it, she remembered, the last time Dr. Barnes had called, but that had been back in January.

  She went to get the book, since she’d just been handling it, and when she came back, they spoke for a few minutes about the seance the previous week, and the fake psychic that Colin had exposed. But that wasn’t what Dr. Barnes had come to the bookstore to hear, and Claire knew it.

  “It’s none of my business,” Claire began hesitantly, “but I hope that your interest in poltergeists does not indicate that …” She glanced toward Colin. “How shall I say this?”

  Colin, bless him, had just the right words. “What Claire is trying to say is that at one time we knew your new house well, and it’s no secret that ever since Alison’s death there have been disturbances reported there. I’d hoped that when you and your sister moved in—a psychologist and a musician—that there would be no more disturbances. I knew that Alison would be unhappy with anyone living in the house who did not share her interests—”

  “But that’s impossible!” Dr. Barnes burst out vehemently. “You can’t believe that! The dead—if they survive—why would they still be interested in what happens to what they left behind?”

  Because there is unfinished business here, Claire thought, but did not voice the thought aloud.

  “I hardly know what to say to you. I don’t have any idea how much you know about these things …” Claire began.

  “Nothing,” Dr. Barnes said flatly.

  And abruptly Claire remembered why it was that Leslie Barnes had looked so familiar, even when they were meeting for the first time. “I find that hard to believe,” she said, as gently as she could. “Not if you are open-minded enough to investigate a poltergeist—and forgive me, Dr. Barnes; I don’t think much of the Enquirer, but there must have been something to that story they printed last year. Let me—”

  “Claire.” Colin’s voice was quietly firm. “She came to us for books, not for unasked advice.”

  Claire blinked at Colin in mild surprise. It was unlike him to withhold help, but for some reason, he did not wish her to offer. She thought about the newspaper story. If it was to be believed, Leslie Barnes, then a school psychologist in Sacramento, had experienced a vision that led police to the notorious “Pigtail Killer.” No wonder she had wanted to move as far away from that as possible. How horrible that would be, to find one’s self in the mind of a serial killer … .

  “Oh, please,” Leslie Barnes burst out. “If you know anything at all about this business, I’m at my wit’s end! I was just thinking that I needed all the help I could get!” She looked from one to the other of them pleadingly.

  Claire glanced at Colin. He would not act—but he would not stop her from acting, either.

  “Has there been any poltergeist activity in the house itself?” Claire asked.

  Leslie Barnes took a deep ragged breath, and it all came tumbling out—the crank calls that had begun while she and Emily were still living in Berkeley—the disconnected doorbell that rang when there was no one there and continued to ring after she’d ripped it out of the wall—the troubled nightmares that had plagued both her and Emily, of a blood-drenched howling man … .

  In such company, the poltergeist phenome
na were almost innocuous, but it was obvious that Leslie Barnes was terrified at the thought that the psychic flashes that had begun so suddenly had not simply vanished, but taken on a new and more terrifying manifestation.

  “Take these home and read them,” Claire said, holding out two books, the monograph and the book Alison had written by herself. “And if you like, I can come over this evening and try to see what’s going on in your house.”

  “Are you a medium, too?” Dr. Barnes said, abrupt suspicion and open hostility in her voice. Claire kept her face still, knowing what was going through the younger woman’s mind. Like many of her own patients, Leslie Barnes knew that she desperately needed help, but was deeply wary of accepting any.

  Claire shook her head, searching for the words that would soothe the other woman’s fears. “I’ve had a little experience, nothing more. I’m not sure I can find out anything, but I do know the house, and I could try.”

  “Oh, Colin, how could we not help her?” Claire demanded as soon as Dr. Barnes had left. “You saw—that poor woman was at the end of her tether! What if—if Alison has chosen her—if she’s the one—”

  “She’s strong enough to handle it,” Colin said with that calm conviction that was sometimes his most irritating trait.

  “And you think she’s chosen to scare herself blue with a poltergeist, I suppose,” Claire said tartly.

  “Possibly not,” Colin admitted. “But I do know that she’s chosen to date Simon Anstey.”

  Could that possibly be true? Claire wondered as she walked up the hill to the house later that day. While Colin would certainly not have said such a thing if it were not so, it was nearly impossible to believe.

  Claire had known Simon for a bit over twenty years now, and she had never seen him with anything less than a stunningly dazzling woman, the sort of international trophies men of riches and fame tended to collect as a way of keeping score. While Leslie Barnes was certainly pretty enough, she wasn’t in that class, nor, Claire knew intuitively, did she desire to be.