Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  He pulled out his pipe and fiddled with it for a few moments. Once it was well alight, he picked up the paper at the top of the stack and began to read.

  It was hard to believe he'd lived here for five years, Colin thought idly, walking up the steps of his bungalow a few hours later. The paperwork had been held at bay for another week or so—there were times when he thought that the university would be just as happy if he never taught a single student, so long as the paperwork was all in order. And every year it seemed to increase.

  Five years—long enough to put down roots, to come to love the Berkeley Hills and to begin to understand its citizens' passionate worship of San Francisco. He was building a sound career in academia, with life insurance, a pension plan, and all the rest. It was security, of a sort. But was this really the shape he wanted his life to take?

  Colin pulled the car into his driveway and parked. There were no easy answers, Colin reminded himself yet again. And nothing that had to be dealt with urgently. There was no need for him to take any action in haste.

  He walked into the house, pausing to retrieve his mail from the box beside the door. There was a long cream-colored envelope from the Rhodes Group. They wanted him to come to work for them—a friend of Claire's consulted for them already, and Colin had met one of the directors at a seminar a few years before.

  It was a tempting proposition, but he wouldn't reach nearly as many people pursuing pure research for the Rhodes Group as he did teaching parapsychology at Berkeley. And mainstream acceptance of parapsychology was more likely to be achieved by academic affiliations than through a small though well-respected consultancy.

  If he weren't just deluding himself that this was even possible. What difference was there between "psychic" and "superstitious" in the public mind? Colin shook his head, feeling suddenly bone-weary. He put the letter aside to answer later.

  There were the usual litter of bills and solicitations in the rest of the mail, along with a personal letter and one from the university.

  He took the two envelopes into the kitchen and set them on the counter, looking around for the teakettle. The housekeeper had been here today, with the result that the kitchen was formidably neat and Colin couldn't find anything. Eventually he located what he wanted and turned back to the letters.

  The one from Berkeley was from the dean of faculty's office. Colin tore the heavy envelope open, wondering why it hadn't come in the interoffice mail.

  He scanned the dense academese through once, then reread it more slowly.

  It was a Notice of Intent to Censure. He was being condemned for his radical (read: antiwar) activities as well as for teaching materials and presenting views in his courses that ran counter to the expressed position of the board— whatever that might be this week—as well as potentially undermining the character of the students to whom the university stood in loco parentis.

  It seemed that General Ashwell's labors had borne fruit at last. There was to be a hearing, at which Colin would be given the opportunity to respond to these charges. Depending on the outcome of the hearing, the letter he held in his hands would be placed in his personnel file ... or not. The date of the hearing was next Wednesday, which gave him precious little time to prepare a case.

  The insistent whistling of the teakettle brought Colin back to the here and now. He crumpled the letter angrily into a ball and flung it into the trash, but such a gesture did not affect the facts. He supposed that tomorrow he'd have to start asking around and find out what one did in these cases. The last complaint that had gone into his file hadn't been conducted with quite this much ceremony.

  Trying to focus on the immediate, Colin poured his tea and took it into the living room to drink. It was only then that he remembered the other letter and had to go back into the kitchen to retrieve it.

  It was from Nathaniel Atheling. Colin's heart sank as he opened it, already half-certain of what he would find. The Seal of the Lodge was embossed in bright gold at the top of the folded sheet of vellum, and beneath it a few brief words in Atheling's ornate Spencerian script.

  Colin was called to London, to attend a meeting of the Inner Order.

  Such meetings were rarely convened; the last one had been over twenty years ago. The Lodges worked independently and quietly, without either the internal politics or the empire-building of some of the more public White Orders. For the Visible Head of the Order to send out a summons of this sort meant that matters were grave indeed. There was no question but that he must go at once.

  Colin picked up the phone and began to dial. Two days later, he was in London, the summons from the dead forgotten.

  They met in a quiet, old-fashioned hotel nestled into a side street in Piccadilly. They came from all over Europe and the Far East, these scattered men and women who were closer to Colin than his own blood family had ever been. He had not seen many of them in twenty-five years, and others whom he had hoped to see were sadly absent. There were perhaps twenty people in the room, all of them exoteric Masters or Adepts of the higher Grades—Master of the Inner Temple and above—and Colin was disturbed to see that he was among the youngest there. Their membership had slowly dwindled over the years.

  The postwar world moved too fast—few these days were drawn to a Path that required years of study and dedication for little visible repayment. Those who sought such enlightenment today were far more likely to seek it in hallucinogens, which granted at least the illusion of power.

  But it was power without control and insight without wisdom; a path to enlightenment that only led—for most—to confusion and disenchantment.

  Though his own life's work was toward enlightenment and an end to superstition, Colin wondered—not for the first time—if he ought to actively— openly—teach the disciplines of the Path. Certainly he had earned the right, yet there were so many pitfalls involved in choosing to actively impart the teachings. The question was always not what could he do, but what should he do? To teach meant to risk much, especially in these troubled times. And if his parapsychological investigations caused the university to censure him, only imagine what recruiting a magickal Lodge would cause them to do.

  A familiar figure worked its way across the crowded room, seeking him out.

  "Colin. I'm glad you could make it," Nathaniel Atheling said, as if there had been any doubt that Colin MacLaren would obey this summons.

  The psychiatrist was as correct and nondescript as ever in proper English tweeds; the only unexpected note was the antique scarab of blue faience that hung—as always—about his neck.

  "I wish it could have been under happier circumstances," Colin responded, shaking his old friend's hand in greeting. He glanced around the room. "Is everyone here?"

  "So far as I know," Atheling responded gravely.

  The Order's members operated in the old tradition of secrecy and isolation less from fear of persecution in these more liberal times than from the desire to be free of distractions from listening to the still voice of the Light. It was a rare event for the Order to communicate with its members, much less gather them all together.

  And together they were so few.

  The door to the inner room of the suite opened, and the last member of their gathering entered.

  The present Visible Head of the Order was a grey-haired woman with piercing blue eyes. Colin had met her once, what seemed a very long time ago. She was known to the world as Dame Ellen Lindsey.

  Dame Ellen was in her early sixties, and walked only with great effort, using two heavy black canes. She was dressed somberly in unrelieved black, with no mark of rank or distinction about her.

  "My friends," she said, lowering herself heavily into a chair. "I greet you all in the name of the Unconquered Sun, and apologize for taking you away from your mundane lives. But there is a matter that I must place before you all, and make it the Order's business, though I have waited—perhaps too long— to do so."

  For almost two hours then Dame Ellen spoke, giving them names and places,
dates and facts, and slowly, a chilling story began to emerge. Colin had known some of it beforehand—he lived in California, where nut-cults proliferated, and he'd been in the forefront of the fight against the Black Orders—but even so, the entire picture was more disturbing than even he could have surmised.

  The occult forces that the Order had fought so desperately a quarter of a century before had not been destroyed, as they had once thought. Like some hideous destructive insect, the Black Orders, by whatever exoteric name they chose to be known, had hidden themselves within the body of their most implacable opponent, and now were emerging in strength once more.

  From the very first days of the Third Reich, a clique high within the American government had sympathized with its goals, holding the country aloof from the European war during its early months and refusing to bomb certain targets once America had been forced to fight. And when it became apparent that the Axis Powers' fall was inevitable, those same individuals stood ready with money, false passports, false identities, to aid the Nazi executioners for their own political—and personal—enrichment.

  "You can't just assume the government is the good guys forever," Thorne Blackburn had said to him. And now those words came back to haunt Colin as he listened to Dame Ellen.

  Thousands of members of the SS were smuggled out of Germany and into new identities elsewhere in the world by members of the U.S. government. Some of the greatest human assets of the fallen Reich, such as Reinhard Gehlen and Wernher von Braun, simply changed masters: Spymaster Gehlen to run the CIA operation that provided Russian intelligence to his new American overlords—and to mastermind the architecture of the Cold War itself under the auspices of new intelligence chief Allen Dulles—and von Braun to oversee the space program that was created as a challenge to perceived Soviet dominance of space.

  Gehlen's straw dog of an attack on the West by the Warsaw Pact nations effectively kept Western political analysts from paying sufficient attention to defeated Germany. While postwar America's attention was elsewhere, organizations such as Odessa, the largest of the underground Nazi escape organizations, had been busy rescuing and relocating its members in safe havens worldwide . . . and regaining lost political and economic power. Power that it was now preparing to exercise.

  "Now you know as much as I of the threat we face: the same threat as always, only this time so cleverly disguised that I do not know if we can count on any help at all from the mundane world. To convince them of the reality of this danger could well do as much damage as the Shadow Orders themselves would, and we no longer know who in any government is friend, and who is foe.

  "I cannot choose a specific course of action for you, or attempt to direct your True Wills in this matter, but we must conclude," Dame Ellen said, in her dry, practical way, "that neither the Third Reich nor the Thule Society and its platform of genocide, racial superiority, and directed evolution has been as conclusively defeated as we had once thought them to be. While their members have scattered, we now have every reason to believe that the Shadow Orders are nearly as strong as they were before the war. We believe that they are recruiting and rebuilding a new organization worldwide, though under a variety of new guises.

  "We do not expect this to lead to a conventional war any time in the near future: we must grant our great enemy that it is smart enough to learn from its mistakes. Those I have dared to consult believe that this time the Black Order's grasp at power will take the form of subversion, a slow attempt to remold the governments of the Great Powers in their ideological image."

  "But that isn't possible!" someone whose face Colin couldn't see protested. By his accent he was American, as Colin was.

  Dame Ellen did not censure him. Instead, the lines that pain and weariness had carved into her aristocratic features seemed to deepen, as if she contemplated a grief too terrible to bear.

  "Perhaps not all at once; perhaps never if we are careful and vigilant and do what work we can. But the enemy is capable of waging his war on every front at once, and our resources are few. I will direct the members' attention to the founding of an extremely public organization in San Francisco, California, in April of this year. It calls itself the Church of Satan, and while it does not seem to have any overt ties with the Shadow Orders, the fact that it exists at all is a disturbing harbinger of things to come."

  Colin had heard of it—the press had given it extensive play at the time, and its founder, Anton LaVey, was a master of self-promotion. At the time he'd thought it merely silly; hearing it spoken of here, he wondered if his perceptions had been so coarsened that Evil could seem amusing to him.

  There was complete silence in the room now, the silence of men and women who had given their whole hearts and souls to a Herculean task that had been nearly beyond their strength, only to see that now they must somehow find the will to do it all again.

  "I thank you for your attention and commend you for your vigilance. And I pray that each of you will win those battles the Light sends you, for the sake of all humanity. Go with the Light."

  As she struggled up out of the chair, a woman whose name Colin did not know—a striking redhead with long coltish legs and a runway model's slim-ness—was there to help Dame Ellen to her feet. The younger woman helped the older through the inner door, and it closed behind them with a firm click.

  They were dismissed back to their own lives.

  But lives in which their own subjective senses of threat and peril had now been directed and magnified a thousandfold, for the temple that Colin had smashed five years ago had not been an isolated nastiness, as Colin had prayed. Hasloch had been right. Thorne had spoken the truth.

  It had been a harbinger of things to come.

  His return to the United States less than forty-eight hours later left Colin MacLaren feeling exhausted and disoriented. Most of that time had been spent in the air: the interminable Atlantic crossing to JFK Airport in New York, then a brief layover and almost eight hours more to San Francisco International. And once he reclaimed his car he faced another two hours' drive home.

  It was October, and so it was raining; the veils of fog so dense over the headlands that the Pan Am flight had almost been forced to divert to another airport. When he'd come down the steps onto the rain-slick tarmac and headed for the terminal, the damp chill of San Francisco had settled over his shoulders like a heavy cloak, and in just that short walk his face was chill and numb.

  By the time he reclaimed his car, it was already getting dark. Fortunately the engine started without incident, and soon Colin was driving across the Oakland Bay Bridge toward home.

  In the dark, the other cars on the highway seemed like faceless threatening animals, and Colin's mind turned wearily upon the same fruitless paths. What was he to do about what Dame Ellen had told them? He still had a few contacts from the old days; perhaps he should call someone, investigate to see what corroboration he could dredge up. . . .

  No. The intuition was so sharp and clear-cut that it was impossible to mistake for mere wishful thinking. He had left the Service without ever suspecting it was riddled with double agents and traitors bent on undoing everything he had worked so hard to accomplish, and thus his cover had been perfect. If there was anyone within its ranks still watching him, let them believe he was still blind. A political confrontation was not within his brief.

  But now more than ever it was important to be firm in his beliefs; not to compromise, no matter how tempting the offer. Compromise was a slippery slope that led step by reasonable step into darkness and damnation.

  When Colin reached the bungalow it was already after seven. He opened the door to the ringing of a telephone—hopeless, insistent. He dropped his suitcase to the rug and rushed over to it, leaving the front door still hanging open.

  "MacLaren," he said—slightly breathlessly—into the receiver.

  "Colin! Oh, thank God; I wasn't sure if you'd gotten back yet. Can you come to the clinic? We have an emergency," Claire said.

  Claire did not ask
for help lightly, and the word "emergency" was not often found in her vocabulary. Weary as he was, Colin turned around, got back in his car, and drove to the Bellflower Clinic.

  He could hear the screams from the front door; a harsh sound neither human nor animal, but almost machinelike in its monotonous ululation.

  "Colin!" Maria said with relief, getting to her feet and coming around the end of the receptionist's desk to him. Maria was a pretty, petite chkana who was one of the clinic's few full-time paid staff.

  "Thank heaven Claire was able to reach you. Come on."

  Colin followed her almost at a run as she hurried into the back of the clinic, toward the examination rooms. As he did, the mechanical screaming got louder.

  "He's been here since six o'clock this evening. We don't know what to do with him, and Claire said you'd have some idea. In here," Maria said. "And I only said I'd stay until you got here, so I'm getting out of here. I don't want to see anything like that ever again!"

  Colin opened the door.

  At one point, this had been one of the clinic's standard examination rooms, with a table, cabinets for supplies, and posters on the walls that explained the symptoms of the most common social diseases and the commonest forms of birth control. But that was before some force had taken the entire contents of the room and shredded them as if it were an enormous Mixmaster.

  The examination table had been reduced to kindling, the cabinets battered into a twisted mass. The posters had been shredded, and tiny pieces of paper, like insanely festive confetti, were scattered about the room like snow.

  There was a young man crouched in the corner, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. His arms were wrapped around himself, and he rocked back and forth, his face expressionless as he screamed. His face and body were sheened with the sweat of his exertion, but he gave no sign that he knew what he was doing.