Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “I almost forgot,” Colin said, patting the breast pocket of the suit he invariably wore. “I meant to ask if you’d come to the symphony with me next Friday” He extricated two tickets from his pocket and flourished them like a banner. “I picked them up yesterday morning from the box office. It should be interesting,” Colin added with a twinkle in his eye. “Simon’s conducting.”

  NINETEEN

  SAN FRANCISCO, FRIDAY, JUNE 1, 1984

  And all man’s Babylons strive but to impart

  The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.

  —FRANCIS THOMPSON

  THE OPENING NIGHT OF THE SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY’S SUMMER program was jammed with concertgoers in furs and diamonds and long glittering gowns—regardless of how badly suited to the season. Every music lover in SF and the Peninsula, it seemed, had turned out to see Simon Anstey take the podium for his first public appearance in twelve years.

  Colin could find no fault with the performance; Simon was every bit as brilliant a conductor as he had been a performer, and here the maimed hand formed no obstacle to his interpretation of the music. The audience was on Simon’s side from the first downbeat, and by the intermission were as ecstatic as any rock fans.

  “Well, he certainly seems well enough,” Claire said as they were rising to their feet at the interval.

  “How disapproving you sound!” Colin joked, trying to kid her out of her pensive mood. Ever since she’d visited Leslie’s house and sensed the evil in the Sanctuary, Claire had been brooding over Simon. Was it a sense of lost opportunities that depressed her so—he and Alison had always rather hoped an attachment would form there—or did she feel threatened by Simon’s temptation and fall? Heaven knew that there were pitfalls for all who opened their awareness to the Path; perhaps Claire feared her own temptation, whatever form it might take.

  “Come on, why don’t we take a turn around the outside? It’d be a shame not to get a good look at some of those outfits,” he said encouragingly.

  Whatever the cause of Claire’s dark mood, Colin saw in her the frailty he himself had fallen prey to—the overwhelming need to cast aside the detachment that ruled those upon the Path and take matters into one’s own hands.

  “Oh, look!” he heard a familiar voice say. “There’s Colin and Claire!”

  It was Emily and her older sister, Leslie. Colin sensed that Leslie would have preferred not to approach them, but Emily seemed oblivious to any emotional undercurrents and simply wished to introduce her sister to some of her new friends.

  As the four of them made polite conversation, Colin learned that Simon was teaching Emily—a good sign, since it might mean that Simon had abandoned his dream of a comeback. But when he said as much, Emily was quick to defend her tutor’s performing skills, and Colin realized that Simon had not abandoned his dangerous ambition after all.

  The discussion might have escalated into an undignified squabble about Simon—though at his age, Colin had no intention of letting a teenaged girl pick a fight with him—but then, unexpectedly, Simon himself appeared.

  Though it was unprecedented for the conductor to roam the halls during a performance, Simon had obviously been squiring Emily and Leslie about. He looked surprised—and, for an instant, glad—to see Colin and Claire, but almost instantly his manner hardened, and he tried to draw Colin into saying something that would turn Leslie and Emily against him.

  “Colin. I’d forgotten you were a music lover. Or did you come to find out the extent of my disability?”

  Colin returned a noncommittal answer, but Simon refused to let the matter drop. He persisted until Claire, as Colin had feared she would, took his remarks to heart.

  “Why do you think I wish you anything but the best?” she protested, genuinely hurt. “It was for your own sake that I warned you against certain methods—”

  “Wait till you are where I am before you judge my methods, Claire!” Simon snarled. A few minutes later he found an excuse to take the Barneses away with him.

  Claire looked at Colin with troubled eyes, and he patted her arm in wordless reassurance. Though I’m not sure I have any to give. He’s obviously got designs on both the Barnes women—but for what, I wonder? Emily obviously isn’t interested in anything beyond her music, and Leslie seems scared stiff of the Uncanny. “Come on. Let’s go get a drink before the bell rings,” Colin said.

  The Bay Area pagans celebrated the Summer Solstice with a picnic up on Mount Tamalpais toward the end of June, and apparently Frodo managed to quarrel disastrously with his lady fair sometime that day.

  He was nearly useless in the bookshop the following Monday, putting books on the wrong shelves, forgetting what he’d been sent to the storeroom for as soon as he’d gone. His usual sunny cheerfulness was replaced with the stricken quiet of one who has suffered a mortal wound Cassie Chandler stopped by the store that evening and bore him off with her in an act of merciful charity.

  But though Colin had suggested that Frodo take a few days off, he was back at the store the next morning.

  “It helps to have something to do,” he told Colin. “But when I see Emmie playing Trilby to that son-of-a-bitch’s Svengali, I could just—” Frodo sighed.

  “Is it really that bad, Frodo?” Colin asked.

  “Bad enough,” Frodo answered. “‘Yes, Simon,’ ‘No, Simon,’ ‘Oh-yes-I’ll-do-just-as-you-say, Simon,’—it makes me sick to see how he’s exploiting her, stifling her growth as an artist. That man has an ego the size of the Trans-Am Pyramid and the box it came in.”

  Colin smiled faintly. “The box it came in” was the local name for the BankAmerica Building, an ugly black glass skyscraper more suited to New York or Houston than to Baghdad-by-the-Bay.

  Frodo shrugged in wordless disgust. “But nobody can get through to her. Anstey’s got her brainwashed, making her think she’s got to practice all the time and avoid contamination from us hoi-polloi.”

  “She’ll get over it,” Colin said soothingly.

  “How? He’s quick enough to despise what that accident did to him—and quick enough to play off it when it will get him what he wants. He’s practically living at Greenhaven now,” Frodo said.

  “I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to Simon,” Colin said. Frodo snorted eloquently and went to unpack books in the back of the store. The cats, disturbed by his arrival, wandered out to the front in search of quieter company.

  The midsummer air was like milk, and the white Mediterranean light bleached the buildings along the street into a mosaic of pale walls and dense shadows.

  It was nearly noon when Leslie Barnes came through the front door of the shop. She moved warily, obviously on the lookout for Claire, but whether she hoped or dreaded to find her, Colin didn’t think Leslie herself knew. At last she seemed to come to a decision and approached the desk where Colin sat.

  But whatever force had brought her back to the bookshop, it seemed that she could not bring herself to speak of it, and they chatted for several minutes about Poltergeist and Monsignor. The big black cat was brazenly affectionate, as usual, and when Leslie finally brought herself to broach the subject of her visit, for a moment Colin thought that she was still addressing the big neutered tom.

  “We seem to have this cat,” she said. “Or maybe we don’t. Emily keeps saying it’s hurt—in the garage—but there’s never any blood anywhere … I saw that, too. Once. Everyone talks about Alison’s white cats—but there’s something nobody’s telling me.” She closed her mouth tightly, as if to keep herself from saying anything more.

  She’s coming to you for help. Don’t fail her, Colin told himself.

  “I don’t like to say anything, because I didn’t see it myself,” he began carefully, “but one of the reasons that Alison disinherited Simon was—forgive me, Leslie, for telling you something you won’t want to hear—was because he had taken one of her cats and ritually murdered it. Claire told you that Simon was dabbling in Black Magick, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, but—”
Leslie looked faintly greenish. “I didn’t know she meant … that. Why would he do such a thing?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Colin said honestly. “It was not an act of wanton cruelty—though I’m not sure that makes it any better—but the willful destruction of another living being to a deliberate magickal end.”

  It seemed to Colin that Simon had already set his Seal upon her aura. He saw the moment when Leslie’s mind slid away from the horror of it, cloaking what Simon had done in that facile and deadly rationalization of the twentieth century: justifying what had been done as the pursuit of pure knowledge for its own sake.

  “I can’t think of a better reason for investigating parapsychological events than pure curiosity,” Leslie said stubbornly, making the novice’s common conflation of psychism and magick.

  Simon was obviously meddling in Leslie’s life with the techniques of the Left-Hand Path. If matters had progressed as far as Colin feared, it would be too dangerous to allow Leslie to continue in her Unawakened state. Breathing a prayer of apology for what he was about to do, Colin spoke.

  “There is only one acceptable motive for any investigation, scientific or otherwise, and this is the only motive acceptable on the Path: I desire to know in order to serve.”

  Leslie blinked, as though she were being called to awaken from a deep sleep. She was not consciously aware of the inner knowledge that she possessed, but now that Colin had called her Higher Self to mindfulness, her instincts should take over and lead her quickly to the Path once again. And to her destiny.

  When she left the bookstore, Colin watched after her, troubled. He had a feeling he had not experienced in many years—the sense of sending a young warrior into battle against almost insurmountable odds.

  As July sweltered on into August, the Overlight was turbulent with the reflections of Simon’s dark work, though Colin could gain little further Earth-plane insight into his plans or knowledge of what effect—if any—his call to mindfulness had had on Simon’s chosen consort and Alison’s chosen successor. After conducting his series of concerts, Simon had gone on to teach a Master Class at the conservatory—Emily Barnes was in it—before disappearing on an extended business trip at the beginning of August.

  Cassie Chandler—who played with an early music consort, and thus was privy to much of the music-world gossip—said that Simon had flown to Chicago to talk to Lewis Heysermann, the world-famous conductor, about scheduling Simon’s return to the stage.

  Her voice had been studiously neutral as she relayed the information, but Colin was horrified. He was not a professional musician himself, but he had known many over the years. If Simon was expecting to perform in public within a year, he had either lost what was left of his sanity, or he had reason to believe that he would be back at the height of his power soon.

  And there was no natural way for him to be so … .

  The second week of August, Colin awoke to the sounds of crashing thunder; a raging storm powerful enough to rattle the windows and doors of the Victorian. He fought his way up out of sleep, and only then realized that there was no earthly storm at all.

  His body ached as though he’d been sleeping in chains; the effect of the sweltering summer weather, which might allow oblivion but didn’t allow rest.

  He switched on the lamp. It was only a few hours past midnight; he’d fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, and the window fan still desultorily flipped the edges of some papers as it rotated past them. Outside the open windows, the star-choked sky shone cloudlessly over a city parched with unseasonable heat, but in Colin’s mind the storm still resounded.

  What had awakened him? He looked around the room, drawing his cotton bathrobe more securely closed and getting to his feet. He ran a hand over his greying hair and grimaced in annoyance. Whatever it was, it had made no incursion into his conscious mind—and this was no hour at which to awaken Claire and see if she had sensed anything herself.

  As he was making himself a cup of tea—Colin’s universal panacea for those things which could not be cured but must be endured—the phone rang. Colin picked it up at once.

  “MacLaren here.”

  “Did somebody already call you?” Joe Schiafardi sounded faintly suspicious.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Colin said. “It’s the heat. What’s up?”

  Joe Schiafardi was one of Colin’s contacts on the SFPD. He’d been a friend of Alison’s. Colin did not know how deep that friendship had run, nor did he wish to pry, but back when all this had started, Colin had asked Schiafardi to keep an eye on Leslie and the house, and—as far as he could, within the bounds of professional ethics—let Colin know if anything happened.

  “I just called to tell you that Dr. Barnes had a break-in about an hour ago. Some loony with a wrecking maul came in and smashed the sister’s harpischord to matchwood. We chased him off before he could get started on the other stuff, though. Both the women are okay, although they’re pretty shook up”

  “Thank God,” Colin said quietly. Had he been foolish to stay so far out of things, trusting to Leslie to call him when the need was greatest?

  “Say it twice, brother. Funny thing is, we can’t figure out how the hairball got in. The whole house was still locked up tight as a drum when we got there.”

  “That’s … interesting,” Colin said slowly. It wasn’t interesting, of course; it was terrible, confirming the Otherworldly nature of the attack. There could be only one source. But why would Simon lash out so at Leslie and Emily?

  “I’m glad I amuse you.” Schiafardi’s voice was sour.

  “No.” Colin collected himself. “Of course you don’t. It’s just that this is such a shock.”

  “Not as much of one as some skel is going to have when I catch up with him.” Schiafardi’s voice held grim promise. “Jesus, Colin—you should’ a seen that place. It looked like somebody’s put the thing in a blender and then poured it out again.”

  Colin sighed. “I just hope you catch him, Joe.” I wish this had been done by a person that you could catch.

  “Don’t worry; this one we’re putting in overtime on. Dr. Barnes has helped us out a couple of times, and I guess we owe her one”

  After a last brief exchange of pleasantries, Schiafardi hung up—there was still the paperwork to do on the break-in.

  Colin went back to the kitchen and rescued his tea from the teabag. It was stronger than he liked, but he drank it anyway, hoping for clarity, and wished for his pipe, though it had been years now since he’d smoked. Still, he missed the company it had been as he wrestled with some elaborate problem.

  Further sleep would be impossible. He dressed, then decided to walk over to the bookstore. He could use the walk to order his thoughts, and the city streets would have to be cooler than his apartment.

  Though Colin was a supremely urban soul, there was something in him that loved the quiet that could only be found in the city’s unused hours. He supposed he’d learned the habit during the war; strange to think that those events which were still so immediate in his memories were now more than forty years in the past. He was sixty-four this year and soon—not this year, nor even next, but soon—it would be time to leave this life behind and go on to the next turn of the Great Wheel.

  The odd, pleasant melancholy stayed with him as he opened the bookstore. It was nearly six by now, but the only other light on the street was the diner up the block. He went into the back and put the water in the kitchenette on to boil. Claire would be here soon, and normally he’d leave such tasks to her, but if her night had been anything like his own, she would need an immediate restorative.

  He was right. Claire came dragging into the shop at seven-thirty, looking rumpled and puffy-eyed, though her Madras skirt and crisp blouse were bandbox-neat, as usual.

  “I thought I’d be first in. Is that tea I see?” she said hopefully.

  Colin handed her the cup, and Claire drained it in a few swallows.

  “That’s better. Oh, dear, I feel as if I slept ins
ide a kettledrum while the orchestra was playing. There was a terrible ruckus on the Inner Planes last night; I spent most of my night with my hands over my ears, figuratively speaking. I think it was the same energy that I stirred up over at Alison’s Sanctuary a while back—I would have called you, but I thought one of us should get some sleep,” Claire said, a little enviously.

  “It actually managed to wake me,” Colin admitted, “though if it hadn’t, Joe Schiafardi would have. He called to tell me there was a disturbance up at the Barnes house last night.”

  “Disturbance?” Claire said warily.

  “Something turned that harpischord of Alison’s that Simon lent Emily into kindling,” Colin said bluntly. And since none of the windows or doors was forced or even unlocked, three guesses as to the cause.”

  Grief etched itself on Claire’s face, showing Colin what she would look like when she was old. “Simon. But what is he doing?” Claire demanded with weary anger. “He isn’t even here in the City! I’d better go and see—”

  Colin held up a hand. “Wait. It would be better if she asked you to intervene. Leslie’s understandably touchy about things as they stand, and if she were to suspect that either of us has been keeping a weather eye on her …”

  He watched as Claire struggled with her impulse to help and finally sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” she admitted. “Lord! Was I ever that prickly?”

  “That much and more,” Colin assured her, smiling. “That’s not to say that I don’t want you to go, only to have a good obvious harmless reason for going—and when you do, I want you to turn the place inside out and find out exactly what we’re dealing with here. Maybe it isn’t Simon after all.”

  Claire grinned back. “Shame on you, Colin, teasing a helpless woman this way. For a moment, I almost thought you were going to go with a hands-off policy! I’m going to go pour myself another cup of tea—and I suppose you haven’t had anything in the way of breakfast?”