The man that he had once been would not have had these doubts, these fears. But that man was gone, burned to ash in the fires of Berlin. Time had healed Colin. It had brought him wholeness of a sort, and peace. But all the time in the world would not make Colin the same man he once had been. He had counted on the strength of the man who had been the Sword of the Order, only to find that man gone, and himself alone in the vast mansion of time.
As if it were a mundane grace-note to his bleak thoughts, the front doorbell chimed. Colin ignored it. Among the oaths he had sworn was one to conceal the very existence of his Order. He could hardly answer the door in all the panoply of the Light and expect not to raise questions that he could not answer. A parapsychologist was an odd enough fish on the Berkeley campus—a working magician would be beyond the regents' ability to tolerate entirely.
But the doorbell continued ringing, a maddening, insistent two-toned chime that mixed with the heavy patter of the rain. Whoever was standing outside on the steps must be thoroughly soaked by now, continuing to ring despite the fact that they received no encouragement from the dark and silent bungalow.
Who could it be?
Reluctantly—but with a growing sense of urgency—Colin removed his habiliments and tossed them quickly into the brass-bound cedar chest. Grabbing up his wool plaid bathrobe—far too warm for the climate but retained out of sentimental feeling—and donning it hastily, Colin stepped from his study and closed the door.
The ringing doorbell had been replaced with a fainter—but equally determined—banging. Colin switched on the living room lights and opened the door. Rain hissed down, turning the night to silver. Claire London stood on the doorstep, looking like a drowned rat.
Her hair was plastered to her head. Mascara made faint dark smudges beneath her eyes, accenting their color and giving her a faintly demented look. Her camel-colored coat was drenched from shoulders to waist, and heavily water spotted below that.
"May I come in?" she asked. There was no trace in her voice of the urgency that must have impelled her here, or of any consciousness that she was standing unprotected in an icy winter's downpour.
Colin stood back to allow her to enter. Her loafers made a squelching sound as she stepped inside.
"I'm afraid I'm going to drip on your rug," she said, without any apology in her voice.
"Claire, what are you doing here?" Colin said. "Was it something that couldn't wait until office hours tomorrow? It seems a bit late for a social call. And on a night like this ..."
"Who cares what kind of a night it is?" Claire snapped. "What I want to know is why you've decided to ignore me. It's been almost two weeks, and I haven't heard word one from you. Did you mean anything that you said that night? Or was it all hand-holding and head-patting?"
"Let me take your coat and get you something dry to put on," Colin said, placatingly. He could deal with the concerns that had brought Claire here once she was drier; she was risking pneumonia otherwise.
As she shrugged off her dripping coat, Colin turned up the heat and went in search of something for Claire to wear. The best he could come up with was an old wool fisherman's sweater, and he brought it back to the living room just as Claire was kicking off her sodden penny-loafers. She was wearing a jumper with a white blouse so wet now that it was nearly transparent.
"The bathroom's back that way," Colin said, handing her the sweater. "I'll put on the kettle."
While she was gone, Colin took the opportunity to dress again—bad enough, should it come to anyone's attention, that he had an undergraduate of the opposite sex in his house unchaperoned, without him being in his bathrobe as well.
When he returned, Claire was standing in front of the heater, holding her blouse out to the warmth. She'd rolled up the sleeves of the grey wool sweater as much as she could, but the sleeves still swam on her, and the hem of the sweater came down to mid-thigh. She was still wearing her slip beneath it.
"I suppose this will dry—or at least get less damp. I've never been so glad for Antron polyester in my life—if that jumper had been wool, it'd be ruined."
He was becoming used to her mercurial changes of mood by now; they were an attempt to shield herself from her own feelings, as much as from anyone else's.
"I did mean what I said at Alison's, Claire. It's just that I've . . ." I've been busy, Colin wanted to say, but in truth, he could have made the time if he'd wished to, as he had for Jonathan. His failure to follow up with Claire was simply more of that queer failure of nerve that he had experienced tonight, as if some inner heartlight had become extinguished without his noticing.
"Yeah," Claire said cynically. "But it isn't that. Well, it isn't all that," Claire emended. "It's—there's something else, too, more . . . oh, I don't know what to say!" She waved her blouse as if it were a toreador's cape.
"Just drape that over a chair," Colin said. "I'll make you a cup of tea."
"I'll make it," Claire said firmly. From the look on her face, she hadn't meant to say anything like that, but she gamely forged on. "If you'll show me where the kitchen is, at least. I never met a man yet who could even boil water."
Claire London knew her way around a kitchen, Colin decided a few minutes later. She'd unearthed his kettle, run the tap until the water was cold and filled it, and set it on the coils of the electric stove to heat.
She was the most decisively self-reliant person Colin had ever met; the sort of person who would stubbornly walk off the edge of a cliff rather than ask directions.
"You told me to follow my hunches," Claire said. "So I did. Which brings us to this." She shook loose tea into Colin's brown Rockingham teapot and poured the kettle's boiling contents over it. "Why am I here? Was it my idea, or yours?"
"Not mine," Colin admitted. "At least, I did not summon you on any conscious level. And without any great impetus, I don't think you'd have come out on such a wretched night, would you?"
Claire shook her head.
"So what does that leave? What sort of things does your Gift tell you?"
"How should I know?" Claire burst out crossly. "I don't want the damned—darned—thing in the first place. It's lucky, that's all I know— lucky for others."
Colin regarded her steadily. He could not force her to continue, and he did not want to coax her. When a psychic saw manifestation of his or her gift as a route to praise and attention, they would manufacture false information when the true intuition failed. Colin wanted Claire to listen to her inner self and tell the truth.
"I'm sorry, Claire. I'll explain what I can, but I'm not even a Sensitive, and every psychic has a different sort of, well, you might call it a knack. I can help you interpret your experiences, but I can't tell you in advance exactly what sort of experiences you'll have—or why."
Claire turned away and poured out the tea into two waiting mugs. Colin added milk and sugar to his, and reached for a glass jar on the counter. "Have a biscuit," he invited.
"A . . . ? Oh, a cookie," Claire said. She stirred sugar into her tea, then helped herself to a couple of pink-frosted sugar cookies from the bakery near the college. Colin waited, hoping she'd explain of her own accord.
"I've never been particularly lucky," she said, sipping her tea. "I'm not complaining, you understand—it's just that there are some people who're lucky—and they know it. I'm not like that. Never was."
"Go on," Colin said neutrally.
"But I'm lucky for other people, I've noticed. I'm always turning up in the nick of time with an extra safety pin, that sort of thing. I'll take a bus on a whim, just to ride around, and end up taking the seat next to someone who needs a shoulder to cry on. Whenever someone's in trouble, I just seem to be attracted to them somehow. Same now. But somehow, Professor, you don't look like someone in trouble."
"I might be," Colin admitted. With an inward sigh, he surrendered to the guiding hand of fate. "There's something I need to do, and I'm really not sure how to tackle it."
"Tell me about it," Claire said. "I'm good at
solving problems—other people's problems, at least," she added.
"I'm afraid this might be out of your usual line," Colin began hesitantly. Claire was on the threshold of her life—a life that until now had not included the truths that Colin had lived with for longer than he could remember. How to begin, especially knowing that Claire was not bound to the Path in this life?
"Toller Hasloch is holding a Black Mass tonight," Colin said bluntly, "and I'm not sure what to do about it." As good an explanation as any, for something that both was and was not a crisis of faith.
Claire blinked, though she didn't seem as fazed by Colin's words as he might have expected. She thought matters over for a minute or so before she spoke.
"Why do you—I mean you particularly—have to do something about it? Satanism isn't illegal—at least, I don't think it is. 'Do whatever you want, so long as you don't do it in the street and scare the horses,' as the old saying goes."
"So long as no illegal acts are committed during the ceremony, I believe the matter comes under the Freedom of Conscience heading," Colin admitted. "Though if you're talking about Satanism, freedom to make a damned— and I use the word advisedly—fool of one's self is more to the point."
"Only you don't think Toller's joking," Claire said flatly. "Well, neither do I—though if he is, it's just as bad, since he has a well-deserved reputation for nasty jokes. You see," Claire said, brandishing a familiar flyer pulled from the sleeve of Colin's sweater, "I even have an invitation." She shrugged helplessly, unable to articulate what she felt. "Still, that begs the question—why you?"
"It's a complicated question, but I hope you'll forgive me if I have to give you a simple answer," Colin said. "It's my job."
Claire stared at him, cradling her cup of tea in her hands. Obviously, she expected more.
"A number of years ago, probably around the time you were being born, I was over in Europe, but not with the armed forces. I'd been a student at Oxford when Hitler invaded Poland in '39- I could have come home then, but my teachers asked me to stay, knowing I'd be needed. What isn't common knowledge—the Allies kept it pretty quiet, and in their place I imagine I would have, too—was that Herr Hitler didn't only see himself as a conqueror, but as a messiah. National Socialism was as much a cult as a political platform, and like any cult, it had its priests and its rituals."
"So you're saying Hitler was a black magician?" Claire said, trying hard to keep the incredulity out of her voice.
"Members of his inner circle undeniably were. They worked magick in places called Order Castles that were scattered all over Germany. Nazism denounced Christianity and set up a revisionist pagan cult in its place. The forces it called upon in those ceremonies used Adolf Hitler as an instrument of their will. Men can fight men—but only magick can fight magick."
He thought he would lose her then, and blessed Claire for the unexpected gift of belief when he needed it most. He knew this must sound like stark fantasy to her, and he could not reveal the details that would have helped convince her.
"So that's what you did in the war?" Claire asked, a little uncertainly. "You fought magick—with magick?"
"That's what I did," Colin said evenly. "It's not what I was trained to do, but in essence, by accepting the training I did, I also accepted the responsibility for seeing that it and similar disciplines are never used to harm.
"The great mass of humanity neither knows nor cares about magick—true magick, and not the Saturday Matinee Supernatural that many find so entertaining —and they have the right to keep things that way. To not be troubled by forces outside the scope of their daily lives, or manipulated by forces they have no way of resisting. When I find someone interfering in people's lives with magick in that fashion, it's my duty to stop them if I can—for their own sake, as well as for the lives they may harm."
"Is that what you're going to do with Toller?" Claire asked. "Stop him?" "Yes," Colin said, suddenly sure of the direction in which his path now lay. "I am if you'll help me, Claire."
Her mother had always said that men wanted only one thing from women, and that went double for a rich man and a poor woman. The memories were irrelevant, in light of her current task, but as usual, Claire found it hard to get her mother's words out of her head. They were so much like the buzzing of a hornet that would alight to sting painfully the moment you forgot it.
It was still raining, and while she'd borrowed an umbrella from Professor MacLaren, her clothes were only half-dry. She shivered as she walked to the corner, the heavy weight of her purse banging against her hip. Toller's house was halfway down the block of the cross street, and she'd be chilled through by the time she got there. Still, it would add what the professor had called "artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative," a line from something called "The Mikado." He'd promised to play it for her when this was over. He'd promised her a number of other things, all of which Claire warily filed in the category of "too good to be true."
Despite that—against every instinct and experience—she trusted Professor MacLaren absolutely. He radiated a sort of goodness—not the sappy, all-absolving infatuation of the worse forms of Christianity, but a sort of demanding kindness, a kindness that knew that goodness was possible, though hard, and that you were capable of it.
Faced with such belief, Claire's first instinct was to disappoint it somehow, to evade it and drop back into the anonymous herd. But she wasn't going to do that. Her self-respect wouldn't allow it. The professor believed she was worthwhile; she owed him more than she could easily put into words for his honesty and steadfastness. And besides that—on a very different level, but one that seemed pointed in the same direction—she felt that Toller Hasloch had gotten away with his pranks—too small a word, but it was all she had— for long enough.
What he was doing wasn't right. It was like the bigger, stronger bully beating up the younger schoolkids, just because he had the strength they lacked. As the suffering victim of bullying—from classmates, siblings, teachers, everyone who'd respond to her differentness with automatic malice— Claire hated bullies with the strongest passion at her command. If that was Toller's game, he deserved everything the world could dish out. And apparently one of the things the world could dish out was Colin MacLaren.
As she turned the corner, a gust of wind nearly wrestled the umbrella away from her, and as she turned, fighting with it, Claire's coat blew open and a blast of air cut across her ribs like an icy knife. She could no longer see the professor's car, parked halfway up the side street, but she knew he was there.
He'd assured her that once she'd found the room that he said must be hidden somewhere in Toller's house and signaled him as they'd arranged, he would be able to come to her aid at the right moment, and stop Toller Hasloch from doing . . . whatever he meant to do tonight.
A Black Mass ... it sounded unbelievably medieval, and of course it didn't seem to be mentioned in her invitation. The fact that she'd received one at all brought her thoughts full circle, back to her mother's convictions about rich men and poor girls and the only thing men wanted.
Damn Mother and her sisters both. The little inner voice—the one that always caused her trouble, the one that dragged her into headlong collisions with other people's lives—was silent at the moment, but the memory of its insistence earlier this evening lingered like the aftermath of a dream. What would her family say about her throwing herself at Professor MacLaren that way? That a woman's first duty was to get married and settle down, and find some man to protect and provide for her, probably. Only she didn't think Professor MacLaren was willing to fall in with Mother's plans—nor did Claire think her mother would quite approve of a man on such easy terms with Satanism and parapsychology.
It was much safer to think about Toller Hasloch. Now there was a catch to delight a proud mama. . . .
Of course Toller had never been acutely interested in her, but somehow Claire had always found herself coming along to his bigger parties, usually brought by a
friend of a friend, as these things went. This was the first time she'd gotten a personal invitation, and it wasn't hard for Claire to imagine why. After she'd fainted—or worse—under the influence of the spiked punch at his Halloween party, she'd become more interesting to someone like Toller Hasloch—assuming she could believe half the things about him that Professor Colin MacLaren had told her.
And despite experience and inclination, she could. She did. And she would do her best to provide the help that the professor had asked for.
Claire mounted the steps and rang the bell.
The person who answered the door was vaguely familiar to Claire from previous parties: a tall, older man with blazing blue eyes whose autocratic air didn't quite seem to fit him. He smiled when he saw Claire and gestured her inside.
"Come in, come in, come in! Welcome to Toller Hasloch's House of Fun— please make yourself right at home."
He reached for her umbrella, and Claire, not sure of what else to do, surrendered it to him. There was no reason to believe that everybody here was of sinister intent; Professor MacLaren had stressed that most of them were probably innocent bystanders, completely unaware of Toller's secret plans. Claire reminded herself of that firmly as she added her coat to the collection in the bulging hall closet and walked past the stairs and into the living room/ dining room of the large white Victorian, clutching her purse tightly against her chest.
Miraculously, the old house had escaped the almost inevitable subdividing that had come with the trend to smaller families and the postwar urban flight of the last several decades. Half of the first floor was given over to two large rooms—the living room and the dining room or parlor—while the other side held kitchen, closets, foyer and stairs, and a small room that Toller used as a study. The two large rooms could be closed off from each other by oak sliding panels that were currently thrown open, making the two into one large room that was filled with local college students—a lot of people for a late party on a Thursday night when everyone had classes the next day. The record changer of the hi-fi set in the corner held a stack of current LPs, and the Chad Mitchell Trio was on the turntable, singing "John Birch Society."
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