Alison sighed harshly. She turned away from the fire and reached for a malachite box on the coffee table. She took out a cigarette, and Colin lit it for her. Claire handed Alison her drink.
"For the last couple of years . . ." Alison began, and stopped, shaking her head. "Well, actually, it goes back further than that. Simon has always been . . . adventurous."
"Adventurous?" Claire said blankly.
From her expression it seemed an inadequate condemnation, but Colin understood exactly what Alison meant. "Adventurous" meant that Simon had turned aside from the practices and exercises his teacher had set him and had gone exploring the paths of power by himself.
"He . . . oh, hell, Claire, you know what Black Magick is. Simon played around with it a bit as a boy, before I caught him at it and gave him merry hell. I thought I'd set him right; the stuff's as bad as hard drugs, and just as seductive. But somewhere—" Alison broke off to sip at her drink, wincing as if it were medicine. Her cigarette made lazy blue spirals up toward the ceiling.
"You know how easy everything's ever been for Simon. Not that he hasn't had to work at his music, but his work's always paid off. There's never been anything he wanted that he didn't—eventually—get." She ran a hand through her hair. "You might say he's never lived in an irrational universe.
"So when I wasn't looking, he came up with this theory that while the practices of the Left-Hand Path were dangerous, they could be performed safely, so long as it was by a trained Adept taking proper precautions."
Colin stared at her in horror. "You know that's not true."
"Oh, yes. But it sounds so plausible, doesn't it? And look at the rewards: absolute power over the Material Plane, the resolution of all obstacles, the destruction of old age—the ability to heal the sick, to raise the dead. . . ." Alison smiled bitterly. "Only we aren't meant to have that power. We're not gods—we don't have access to the Formless Uncreated from which all Manifestation flows. The power to perform all these lovely parlor tricks has to come from somewhere, and for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve it comes from blood—from stealing the life energy of others."
"From murder," Claire said flatly.
"Animal sacrifice, usually, but yes. And from torture before the sacrifice, to raise the power to its ultimate expression."
"And Simon was doing this?" Colin asked, incredulous. "Really doing it?"
"He did it once," Alison said. "Years ago. One of my cats. When I caught him, I told him that if he ever did that again, I'd—" She broke off and laughed bitterly. "I told him I'd cut off his left hand."
Claire flinched, as if trying to ward off the image. "But that was years ago, Alison," she said hopefully. "And you didn't mean it."
"I did mean it, Claire, and he knew it, so—as I thought—he dropped the stuff. And then a couple of years ago he brought it all up again, just hypothetically this time, thank god. I could see what was happening, where he was going with this, but there was nothing I could do to talk him out of it. He kept saying that the Left-Hand practices had been barred from our use through nothing more than superstitious ignorance, and the time for that was over. I only hope that this tragedy, well, makes him take stock of his life and look inward. But you know, I've wondered sometimes lately if he might not be right? The world seems like such a dark place these days. . . ." She sighed.
"To turn to the Dark is never right," Colin said firmly. He felt like a hypocrite as he said it, even though he knew he was telling only the truth. He simply hadn't known, when he was first taught this Rule that he must live by, how hard it was, and how overwhelming the temptations to surrender could be.
He wondered what Simon's temptations had been, and which of his friends and mentors had failed him most. We are all each other's caretakers, Colin reflected. He did not think he had been a good one, so far.
Looking back at his life, all Colin could see were halfhearted attempts at stewardship, as though it were something he had been only playing at until he could return to his rightful work. But stewardship was his rightful work. The sanguine glamour that had been cast over his early life had been meant to fade and leave him as he had been before. Only when he had renounced the power, he had not been able to set aside the memories. To go on, to do what he had been meant to do, he must renounce the memories as well, and set that part of himself to slumber, for the sake of those whose lives he touched.
"Alison, you know there are things we are forbidden to do. It's the Code we live by, and no one ever said it was easy. All of Simon's arguments sound reasonable, but that's hardly the point at issue here. We already know that appropriating the Shadow's methods can only lead to disaster—you and I both have absolute proof of that. The means creates the end—to reach an impeccable goal we can only use the most impeccable tools."
"And so we diddle around with peashooters while the Enemy has the heavy artillery," Alison said bitterly. "And we lose people like Simon every day." She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. "It isn't fair, is it?"
"No," Colin agreed. "But that's the way it is."
Toller Hasloch hovered, an unshared secret, over the conversation. Now Colin had seen the full extent of what damage those ghosts of the past could do, but right now the important thing was not to salve his own wounds, but to lend strength where he could, so that others did not suffer the same pain of separation from the Light that he had brought on himself.
Two weeks later Simon was transferred to a long-term care facility. He was walking—with help—and the long process of reconstructing the left side of his face had begun. Though the eye itself was intact, the sight in his left eye was badly compromised, and he suffered blinding headaches unless the damaged eye was kept covered. But his determination to be what he had been before the accident was unwavering, and almost frightening in its intensity.
"I will play again," he said to his visitors.
The left side of his face was exposed now, crossed with livid red scars awaiting the hand of the plastic surgeon. He wore a patch over his left eye. The blackness of unshaven stubble over the scarred half of his face and neck, along with his half-shaven scalp, gave him a particularly brutish look, though some of the effect was offset by the fact that he was wearing his own clothes at last.
His room at the rehabilitation clinic looked more like a bedroom in a luxurious hotel than like a sickroom. It had a panoramic view of the City, and there was even a fireplace. But the bed was outfitted with side rails and a call button, and all the pathways around the room were wide enough to allow the passage of a wheelchair.
"Simon, there are other—" Alison began.
"'Other things to do with your life than play!'" Simon mocked angrily. "Why, I could teach—or conduct—or compose. So Colin had been kind enough to tell me, the witless hypocrite! He's a eunuch lecturing a whole man on the joys of chastity—"
"Simon!" Claire said, shocked.
Alison had said that Simon was being difficult, but until now Claire hadn't known quite how difficult "difficult" was.
"Yes, Simon," Simon jeered. "And I'll tell you—both of you—what I told him: I do not intend to lie down and seek the consolations to be found in groveling submission to the ineffable Will of God. That was never my way, and I don't intend to take it up now. Why are we given power, if not to use it?"
"You know the answer to that," Claire said quietly.
"I know the answer your loving God would have me choose," Simon snarled, "but—"
He broke off, stiffening in his chair. His head jerked to the side and he twitched spasmodically, as if an electric current were running through him. His lips were curled back from his teeth in a snarl that forced beads of blood through the surface of his half-healed scars.
"Get the nurse!" Claire barked, jumping up from her chair and running over to him. "Simon—Simon, can you hear me?" The muscles under her hands were rigid, and Simon did not answer.
In a few more seconds—though it seemed an eternity—the seizure had passed. Simon slumped against Claire, panting raggedly.
"Mr. Anstey!" the floor nurse said, coming in just ahead of Alison.
"All . . . right. I'm all right now," Simon said, his voice barely a whisper.
"He had another one of those spasms," Claire said. Simon's face was slick with mingled sweat and blood. She plucked the silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of his dressing gown and blotted his forehead with it. The lid of his good eye drooped with exhaustion.
"I think that you ought to get back into bed," the nurse told Simon. "The doctor has written you a prescription for—"
"No drugs," Simon said breathlessly.
"If they'll help you heal, you should take them," Alison said. Her face was twisted with the pain she felt for him. "The faster you heal, the less need you'll have for them."
"Let me help you get him into bed," Claire said to the nurse. It helped that they knew here that she was an RN; it made the staff more willing to rely on her.
Between the two of them, Claire and the floor nurse quickly muscled Si-1 mon into bed and out of his dressing gown. He wasn't able to be of much help—the wracking nerve spasm had left him weak—but the two of them got him tucked in easily.
"Mr. Anstey, you really should—"
"Go away," Simon said tiredly.
Claire understood why he was so unwilling to accept any of the painkillers the staff wished to give him. She herself rarely took anything stronger than I aspirin, and never drank anything stronger than the occasional glass of wine. Both Alison and Colin had offered to erect the Wards that Simon was still too weak to build, but he had angrily rejected their help—calling it pennies to a | blind beggar's cup—and they could not act without his permission.
But it was a hard row to hoe, relying on your own strength alone, anc Claire's heart wept for him. She took his good hand in both of her own. "Rest now, Simon," she said gently. "I'll watch with you."
"You're a good girl, Claire," Simon said. His fingers flexed momentarily about her own as he fell down into unguarded sleep.
When Claire was certain he'd gone deep enough not to be pulled back into wakefulness by any lingering twinges, she tucked his hand under the covers and got to her feet, tracing the Seal of Man on his forehead with a light touch. She shook her head ruefully, gazing at Alison.
"I wouldn't want to be in charge of his treatment," she said in a low voice. J "He's the worst sort of patient to have: bright, stubborn, and half-right."
The description, as she'd hoped it would, brought a smile to Alison's face.
"I know that Colin had to go back East, but you'll stay with us awhile, won't you, Claire?" Alison said, almost pleading. "I think Simon might listen to you. We've quarreled so much this past year that I think he's just got the idea that I'm opposed to anything he wants to do, and I'm not." There was a faint quiver in the older woman's voice.
"Well, if he thinks I'm going to go along with those crack-brained ideas of his about using magick to heal himself, he's in for a rude awakening," Claire said firmly. "It's foolish, and it's wrong."
"You're right, my dear," Alison said, sounding more like her old self, "but you have no idea how stubborn Simon can be."
"I've known a few stubborn men in my life," Claire said, with a faint smile. "And however bad Simon is, he can't be half as stubborn as Colin."
FIFTEEN
GLASTONBURY, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 1973
He sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love, But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he could approve.
— PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
THIS MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN A GOOD IDEA, COLIN ADMITTED TO HIMSELF AS HE drove north along the Taconic Parkway. But staying in San Francisco and browbeating a helpless invalid—and Simon Anstey was still very close to being that, no matter how sharp his tongue—was not a useful course of action either, and Colin had barely been able to have a civil conversation with Simon any time in the last two weeks.
John Cannon's last book, Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, had been edited and returned to Jamie Melford—along with a basic reading list, so that he and Barbara could begin to understand the strange world they'd been ' thrust into.
Colin had been more than a little disturbed at the material contained in the manuscript. Now, rituals and techniques that had been closely guarded I secrets for centuries—and had been at least hard to find in Thorne Blackburn's heyday—were, through popularizers such as John Cannon, available to anyone with a dollar bill. And the easier they were to find, the more frivolously they would be used, with disaster the inevitable result.
The Path was not a thing to be entered onto lightly out of a rainy day's boredom; nor were its paths to power suitable to every individual's state of mind, even in a democracy where—in theory—all persons were created equal. Far too many people were driven into the magickal underworld not by any inborn craving for the answers there, but because conventional science had failed to provide them any answers when their lives were interrupted by the Unseen. The only thing that could truly help these people was to open the closed minds of the physical sciences, and that could only be done by offering them proof on their own terms.
And that was the heart of the reason why Colin was making his journey north to the Taghkanic College Campus, and the Margaret Beresford Bidney Memorial Psychic Science Research Laboratory.
The college's nearest neighbors were the town of Glastonbury and a small artist's colony; Colin visited them both involuntarily before he finally found the campus. A recent snowfall—winter was harder here, north of NYC— made the roads treacherous, and some of the smaller roads hadn't been plowed at all. After ending up in the center of Glastonbury for the second time, Colin got back onto the main road and this time found the turnoff for Leyden Road. This time he crossed over the railroad tracks—the point at which he'd turned back last time—and made it all the way to the college. He felt an unreasonable sense of triumph as he passed between the fieldstone posts and beneath the wrought-iron gateway that said "Taghkanic College."
Even in the depths of winter, the college had a stark Victorian prettiness. Brick walkways, swept clean of snow, crossed the lawns between the black, winter-bare trees; when the trees were in bloom the campus must be dazzling. It was as if Colin had stepped two centuries back in time; the college stood like something preserved in Arctic ice, an echo of another age. He drove slowly past the red brick buildings and the clumps of anonymous students moving between them, looking for his destination. Dr. Newland had told him that the laboratory was impossible to miss . . .
. . . and he'd been perfectly right, Colin decided a few moments later, standing beside his parked van and staring up at the snow-dusted structure with something like awe.
The effect was very much as if someone had plunked down a Greek temple among a group of log cabins. The building's shallow porch was supported by seven Doric columns, and above them, in bronze letters weeping verdigris into the porous white marble were the words: MARGARET BERESFORD Bidney memorial psychic science research institute. The relief above the name depicted classical themes: Helios, Pandora, Prometheus; all examples of mankind reaching for the power of the gods.
It was a pity, Colin reflected, that all those tales ended in tragedy, but the Greeks weren't much on happy endings to begin with. Colin climbed the shallow steps and stepped onto the porch. The stone above the bronze entry-way was carved with the quotation from Joel 2:28: "Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions." Colin pulled open the door and walked in.
He found himself inside a small rotunda, as if this were truly the temple its form mimicked. The marble beneath his feet was inlaid in an elaborate knot, and the domed glass roof filled the room with light. The elaborate bronze clockface set into the wall opposite the door told him that he was only a few minutes late for his appointment.
The receptionist was obviously one of the students who attended the college; she had a pile of textbooks beside her elbow, but she looked up alertly when Colin
entered. Oversized aviator glasses with wire frames gave her the look of a helpful dragonfly.
"Hi; I'm Leonie. Nesbit?" she added, as if she weren't quite sure. "Can I help you?"
"I'm Colin MacLaren. I have a two o'clock appointment with Dr. New-land, but I'm afraid I'm a little late—"
"Oh, Dr. MacLaren! Yes, Dr. Newland is expecting you. Go right through that archway and all the way down the hall—it's the door at the end." She pointed over her shoulder.
Colin went in the direction she indicated, past a row of white doors with names beside them that led into office cubicles. At the end of the hallway there was a cross corridor, and just before it an open area, with file cabinets, a couple of vacant secretarial desks, and a coffeepot and refrigerator.
The place seemed oddly deserted; even the coffeepot was empty. Straight ahead was the door that Leonie had mentioned; set into it in severe bronze letters were the words: Dr. Reynard Newland, Director. Colin knocked, then opened the door.
Dr. Newland was sitting behind a massive rosewood desk in an office that was almost a stereotypical recreation of the study of an Oxford don. The windows on the left side of the office looked out on a screen of snow-covered pines through which could be seen some of the other campus buildings. Built-in bookshelves set into oak-paneled walls were filled with a variety of exquisite and well-loved books, and there was a tall glass cabinet filled with curios along the other wall. There was a coffee table and a set of club chairs in the far corner for more relaxed seating, and the jewel-tones of an antique Persian carpet glowed upon the floor.
Dr. Newland was in his mid-seventies, Colin guessed, and the ill-health that was the reason for his retirement had given his skin a waxy pallor. But he was cheerful enough as he rose from his seat behind the desk and motioned Colin to a chair.
"Sit down, Dr. MacLaren. You look rather frazzled—not too much trouble finding the college, I hope?"
"Not after I'd exhausted every other possibility," Colin agreed, smiling. "I'm sorry I'm late."
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