Heartlight

Book 6: "Light"

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Gothic

Synopsis

Heartlight is the story of Bradley's greatest champion of good, Colin MacLaren, as he carries the banner of Light through the second half of the twentieth century. Ghostbuster, exorcist, student and teacher of the mystic arts, Colin meets Claire Moffat, who becomes his dearest friend, when he rescues her from a cult bent on human sacrifice.

The leader of that cult, Toller Hasloch, becomes one of Colin's greatest enemies. Working behind the scenes for the next thirty years, Hasloch subtly manipulates politics and the economy to turn America away from the Light. Colin, busy saving lives and teaching the next generation of psychic warriors, realizes almost too late how Hasloch has warped America's promise.

Now, Colin MacLaren is the only one who can face Hasloch and the hellhounds the younger man has unleashed. He must fight on, while the fate of America, and perhaps all mankind, hangs in the balance.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: November 17, 2003

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 384

Sample

Heartlight

ONE
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5,1960
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air, Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!
--WILLIAM WORDSWORTH


IN JANUARY OF THIS YEAR A MASSACHUSETTS SENATOR NAMED John F. Kennedy announced that he was going to run for president of the United States. In February, the civil-rights protests that had torn the New South apart for the last four years escalated in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Elvis Presley--a white entertainer whose musical roots were in black "soul" music--received his first gold album.
In May, a U.S. pilot named Francis Gary Powers was shot down as he piloted his U-2 over Russia, sharply escalating the Cold War tension that held all Europe in the grip of a political winter, and the Queen of England's younger sister, Margaret, married Antony Armstrong-Jones in a wedding that captured the glamour-starved public imagination in a way that nothing had since Grace Kelly's fairy-tale wedding four years before.
1960. The year when the future itself was the New Frontier. But it was a frontier that was not without its Old World goblins. This was the year during which many in the world would awaken from their emotional paralysis and finally begin to total up the true cost of "the last good war"--the war before Korea, the war whose cost had been buried in the postwar economic boom. 1960 was the year that Adolph Eichman was finally arrested in Buenos Aires and taken to stand trial for his crimes inthe embattled state of Israel. His trial would be broadcast worldwide, cementing the new medium's--television's--place on the New Frontier, making it an integral part of a world that could still believe in the global classroom and the global village.
1960. It was a year when the Great Powers continued to divest themselves of colonial possessions that seemed to belong to another time. A year that saw increased fighting in an area of the world still often miscalled the Belgian Congo, and a fledgling United Nations that was starting to flex its international muscle (while the Vatican and its newest Pope, John XXIII, claimed the same "right and duty" to intervene in foreign affairs for itself).
That summer, a thirteen-year-old government agency called the Central Intelligence Agency, which had been formed out of the remnants of the wartime OSS as a direct challenge to the FBI's increasing power, would begin the disastrously unsuccessful series of assassination attempts against foreign dictators--notably last year's new Caribbean strongman, Fidel Castro of Cuba--that would cause its fall from grace a quarter of a century later when the details of its various attempts were finally made public. At the Democratic National Convention, the popular and well-connected young senator from Massachusetts would choose a fifty-two-year-old Texan named Lyndon Baines Johnson as his running mate, and the Soviet Union would continue consolidating the gains of its infant space program.
It was a year of hope and despair; twelve months that saw the appetite for freedom spread like wildfire through Asia and the Middle East while Europe groaned beneath the weight of an Iron Curtain rung down upon it by allies turned to enemies. Like a phoenix from the ashes, the Russian Bear had risen up out of the cinders of the Allied victory to menace the nations of the West anew, armed with weapons that made a war too terrible for sane men to contemplate. Civilization stood poised on the brink of nuclear hellfire, and the world powers jockeyed for position in the new world order that was to come.
This was the world that Colin Niall MacLaren had returned to four years before--an exotic country that had created television and defeated polio, and had relegated Colin's war to the mists of the dead past. When he'd left Europe, he'd left behinda West Germany barely beginning to come to terms with the enormity of its crimes, but a West Germany no longer controlled by the Great Powers, a political landscape shattered and recast in no one's image over the nearly twenty years he'd been there.
He'd spent almost half his life in exile of one sort or another from the country of his birth. He'd been in Paris when the German army had marched in; a tall, lanky young man with piercing blue eyes beneath shaggy pale brows and the indefinable air of the eternal student about him. He was barely old enough to vote in the land of his birth, but at nineteen years of age Colin was already old enough to know that the war he was called to fight was not one that could be fought in an American uniform.
He'd spent the first half of his twenties running and hiding and killing, fighting for the Light against the Black Order that had manipulated an entire nation into doing its will. Friendships were brief and intense, made more piquant by the threat of torture and death that was a bitter fact of life for those who set their will in opposition to that of the Thousand-Year Reich.
When V-E Day had come in '45, Colin's war had in one sense only begun, for now that the German threat was ended, he was called upon to cleanse and to heal, to purify the battlefield just as a doctor sterilized the wounds of battle, so that the healing could be clean and the patient could rise up and go on with his life.
And at last, as with all tasks, there had come a time when that work, too, must be counted as done.
Coming back to Manhattan in the spring of 1956 had been like returning to an alien future for Colin MacLaren. There were skyscrapers everywhere he looked, and more under construction. The new UN Building dominated the East Fifties, and the friendly trolleys he remembered from his boyhood excursions into the City with his parents were long gone--along with the grassy verges on Park Avenue and the five-cent cup of coffee. Fortunately, Colin wasn't faced with the immediate need to find employment upon his demobilization--his back pay, courtesy of the U.S. Army, saw to that.
Almost at once, Colin had fled the city for the security of his boyhood home in Hyde Park. His Scots father had died whenColin had still been a boy, and his mother had died while Colin had been in Europe, but the old white farmhouse was still just as he'd remembered it. The house was the bulk of his mother's estate, but there was enough left over to pay property taxes and most of the bills for some years to come.
And so, for the first time in more years than he wanted to think about, Colin MacLaren found himself both at liberty and at leisure, without any demands on his time and no one attempting to kill him. The Hudson Valley was still as peaceful and welcoming as he recalled; he surrounded himself with his books and his music and learned once more to sleep without having to keep an ear cocked for a knocking at his door or the summoning midnight ring of the telephone. He was free. The world was at peace.
The quiet of the country healed something inside him that he hadn't known was injured, but after only a few months at home Colin realized that the bucolic countryside was no place for him, and so, after much thought, he'd sold the old place and gone south again, back to the bustling city in the spring of 1957.
There, he invested the proceeds from the sale of the house and the small family legacy in the purchase of a three-story apartment building on a side street in the East Twenties. It was divided into seven apartments; Colin left the management of it in his landlord's hands and moved into the vacant apartment on the top floor. The building was an investment that would--he hoped--provide him with both a roof over his head and a certain amount of income in the years to come, freeing him to continue his true work.
If he could only still be sure of what that was. Once not so very long ago it had seemed presumptuous to plan for a future that included old age, and afterward, his work had been clear-cut, and clearly set before him. Now everything had changed. For an Adept on the Right-Hand Path, dedicated to the Great Work of Transformation, his responsibility was to provide aid to those in need and succor to those others who were, as he was, pilgrims upon the Path. But the country he'd come home to was throwing itself headlong into the twenty-first century, intent on only what it could see and hear, smell and touch and taste.America in the fifth decade of the twentieth century seemed curiously indifferent--even numb--to the Unseen World that existed just beyond the grasp of these five senses.
That disinterest was not enough to make Colin despair--despair, in any case, was a sin, and Colin had seen things far worse in the last several years than the cheerful contentment of the American middle class. But it did make him wonder what his work in the world was to be, and if he had indeed made the right decision by coming home.
But knowledge of the future was in no man's gift, and so Colin set aside his own worries and concentrated upon the work before his hands, just as his teachers had taught him. Colin hated superstition with a passion; if not for the superstitious fears of the average German of three decades before, the whole nightmare machinery of the Nazi Party would never have gained its death-grip on European politics. He would fight superstition when and how he could, with the greatest weapon at his disposal: knowledge.
He signed a contract to give a series of lectures on folklore and the occult in one of Manhattan's numerous "universities without walls," and set about making his new accommodations into a true home. His few personal possessions were quickly reclaimed from storage, and bookshelves built and fitted to the walls. Slowly he adapted to the bustling beat of "cliff-dweller" life. He bought a typewriter and began producing articles for a number of small and arcane journals; their publication brought him a small but carefully-tended list of correspondents and--very occasionally--a cry for the sort of help Colin was uniquely qualified to provide.
But something was still missing, and as winter drizzled its way into spring once more, Colin took to the streets, trying to relearn what he thought of as "his" city on his long, rambling walks. The street that held his brownstone bordered (at least in a realtor's imagination) on the northern edge of Greenwich Village, and most evenings, after his other obligations were finished, Colin found himself walking the Village's twisted streets and byways.
He was looking for something, that much he knew, but whateverit was, he did not find it there--or at least, he did not recognize it if he did. More and more as the weeks passed, Colin realized that this was not the place that he belonged. He did not fit in here--not into this bustling New York, and certainly not among the scraggly poets and alienated philosophers in the coffeehouses of the modern Bohemia.
Colin instinctively disliked them and their rebellious culture even as he feared that the emotion he felt came not from what they were but from a lack within himself. The plaintive "folk" singers at places like Gerde's Folk City only made him remember how much he preferred the savagely constrained passions of opera to the almost atonal folk music that filled Folk City and venues like it.
But as he found himself--against all training--dismissing those youngsters who had never gone to war as a generation without discipline, he was finally disturbed enough by his feelings of anomie to share them with the only other exoteric member of his Order currently in America: Dr. Nathaniel Atheling.


It was a raw grey day, and the wind whipping in off the river cut like a knife. The yellow-brick bulk of Bellevue Hospital looked unpleasantly animate, as though at any moment it might get up and walk. This far downtown, the Brooklyn Bridge, not the Empire State Building, dominated the skyline. Colin shivered as he hurried toward the glass doors marked ADMITING.
Atheling had been a member of the Order's Lodge in Cairo, but Cairo had not been his home. He'd come to the United States immediately after the war, one of the stateless persons that the global conflict had created. Atheling had a medical background, making the transition easier--once he had requalified, he had taken a staff position at Bellevue.
As the rich and even the middle class continued forging inexorably uptown, Lower East Side hospitals like Bellevue bore more and more of the brunt of the poor and immigrant population's needs for physical as well as mental health care.
Like that of most men his age, Colin's childhood had been scarred by the Great Depression. Poverty was foreclosure anddebt, clear-cut and easily recognizable. He didn't think of what he saw here as destitution, but he knew it made him uneasy. Odd to think of America as a country of the poor.
Dr. Nathaniel Atheling had a small office on the third floor of the main building. Colin found it without difficulty and knocked on the door.
Atheling was a spare, slender man, closer to fifty than to forty. His dark hair was several weeks late for a haircut, shot with early silver, and when he glanced up Colin could see that his eyes were a curious light amber color, nearly gold. The only thing at all out of the ordinary about his appearance was the scarab pendant in bright blue faience that hung from a silver chain about his neck, resting against his sober institutional necktie. He was seated behind a desk covered with paper.
"Ah. It's three o'clock. That means you must be Colin MacLaren," Atheling said. His voice held no trace of any accent, and only a careful precision hinted that English might not be his native tongue.
As Colin closed the door behind him, Atheling raised his right hand in what might have been a casual gesture. Certainly any of the Uninitiated who saw it would mistake it for such, as they were meant to: it was the Salute given from an Adept of a higher grade to one of a lower.
Reflexively Colin returned the salute, lower to higher, and sat down in the uncomfortable plastic chair on the other side of Atheling's desk.
"Forgive me for receiving you in these surroundings, Dr. MacLaren, but my days are long, and you had indicated that this was a matter of some ... personal urgency."
"A neat way of putting it," Colin said. "And please, drop the title. Call me Colin. It's a Ph.D., not a medical degree. I don't really feel entitled."
"As you wish, Colin. Now, if you were one of my patients, I'd ask you to tell me what seems to be the trouble, and ask you to be honest, no matter how fantastic the events seem to you. And I suppose that's still as good a way as any to begin ... ."




That meeting was the first of many--though Colin had gone first to Atheling as a Brother in the Order, he'd quickly found friendship as well as spiritual guidance and sound advice. It had been Nathaniel who had finally suggested that New York's nearly-familiar streets might not be what Colin really needed, and had suggested a course of sunshine and sea air, in a place as different from New York as Colin could find.
He'd also pointed out what Colin already knew: that in less than two years, Colin had managed to dig himself a cozy rut ... or bunker--and it was mental comparisons like this that had convinced Colin that Nathaniel's advice was sound. He wasn't building to face the challenge of the future; he was retreating from it in confusion and perhaps even fear. He needed to get out into the world again; force himself to confront it as it was now and stop setting it against the backdrop of his memories.
The means were obvious. He was lecturing nearly every evening now, on wide-ranging subjects that followed his lifelong interests, and he always felt most at home at University. A long time ago--in a life that seemed now as if it had belonged to someone else--he'd even planned to make a career of teaching. Why not pick that place to reenter his interrupted life? On a college campus he'd be immersed in the tidal surge of the here and now, his daily life filled with youngsters whose eyes were fixed on the future.
It was a good solution, though it took a surprising amount of courage to implement. In the fall of '59, Colin finally nerved himself to take the first step.
Though Colin's academic credentials were a little rusty after ten years spent first with the Office of Strategic Services and then the Army of Occupation, they were still fairly attractive to prospective employers, and the lectures he gave, unorthodox though they were, were a point in his favor. In the end he was able to choose among several offers. Mindful of Nathaniel's advice to take something as far from what he was accustomed to as possible, he turned down offers from Columbia University and Boston College, and signed a contract with the University of California at Berkeley.
The reluctance that he felt as the date approached to leave his cozy apartment to its new tenant convinced him more than anything else that Nathaniel had been right; Colin needed more of a change of scene than New York had been able to give him. He needed to make a new start, in a new place.
California.


The silent campus--a vision in pale brick and prestressed concrete--had the ancient dreaming air of a sun-drenched Athenian city. The highest visible point in the brilliant Mediterraneanesque landscape that stretched before him was the campanile/ clock-tower which added its quaint Graustarkian accent to the panorama of campus buildings that rose up beyond Sather Gate.
There was no traffic on Bancroft; the street scene was infused with that peculiar midmorning hush that Colin MacLaren had already learned was a distinctive feature of the San Francisco Bay Area. Only he mustn't call it the San Francisco Bay Area, Colin had also already learned, just as he mustn't call the city across the bay Frisco. It was "San Francisco"--everyone within a hundred miles simply called it "the City," just as if no other city existed--and the "Bay Area." If Colin meant to fit in here he'd do well to pick up the natives' habits of speech as soon as possible.
And he did mean to fit in here, Colin promised himself, into what pundits called the modern Lotos-Land, the Golden State. He was through with war in all its forms--hot war, cold war, forgotten war, undeclared war--and meant to turn his back on everything he'd learned from that most unforgiving of all teachers. As the gospel hymn said, he wasn't going to study war no more. Here he would shake off the ghosts of the past.
Here and now, his life would begin again.
Colin stood a moment longer on Telegraph Avenue staring at the lacy wrought iron gate of the main entrance to the University of California at Berkeley campus. Despite its placid appearance, there was an air of expectation about the campus, the sense of great things afoot.
Realizing he was in danger of loitering, Colin shrugged and took himself across the open space that separated him from Sather Gate. Signs informed him that something called Sproul Plaza was under construction, to be finished next year.
The campus was enormous, stretching for miles in every direction. Within its bounds were several stadia and athletic fields, a Greek Theater, and many of the most brilliant minds in the arts and sciences. Though he'd been a Berkeley resident for a little over a month, he'd been too occupied with tying up his affairs back East and settling into his rented bungalow to take a trip over to the campus. He'd been here last winter for a preliminary interview, but that had been in the depths of the California winter, and it had rained most of the time. Now he was seeing the university campus as it was meant to be seen--a canvas made of cement and stone for sunlight to paint upon. Though Tolman Hall--which housed the Psychology Department--was all the way across the campus on Hearst Avenue, Colin relished the walk through the quiet modern campus.
The sleek modern buildings in concrete and pale brick that he passed oddly evoked the air of a medieval university city while looking as if they were already at home in the future. Few students were in sight as Colin crossed the walk. Though Freshman Orientation began next week, as far as his body could tell, it was still high summer here. Colin had left his ancient trenchcoat back in his closet--he hadn't been able to bring himself to wear a topcoat, and his jacket felt uncomfortably warm, but something in his nature resisted appearing on campus in informal dress. After all, Colin assured himself, the chancellor and the board were known to be very conservative, and his future students would hardly respect him if he were dressed like a beatnik. Psychology was a field where one got enough odd looks anyway, without any need to cultivate personal eccentricity.
And despite his lack of a coat and hat, he was dressed more formally--in dark trousers, vest, tie, white shirt, and belted tweed jacket--than the few passers-by on the streets at midmorning. He wondered if he stood out, revealed as a transplantedEasterner by nothing more than his failure to wear a topcoat.
Colin smiled ruefully at the direction of his own thoughts. For so many years it had been almost second nature to efface himself; to go unnoticed, to deflect any but the most casual attention. He had begun to think that the habit had become a permanent part of his psyche, a characteristic that would remain a part of him through all the lives to come, long after the reason for it had been forgotten. But that was all it was now: habit, and not vital necessity.
Nathaniel had been right, as always. Time, the great healer, had healed him as well. There'd been a time, not so long past, that it would have been impossible for him to take this sort of innocent joy in any passing scene. A time when he had walked in the shadows cast by the Black Order, doing all that he could to bring Light to that Darkness--and always in danger of falling to that Darkness himself.
But thoughts of initiation and ancient magickal orders seemed oddly out of place here on the Berkeley campus. If anything seemed to belong to the world of rationality and sanity it was this place. Berkeley seemed filled with the American spirit--a kind of "can-do" wholesomeness that simply could not comprehend the shadowy half-world in which Colin's battles had been fought. And perhaps, in time, the memories would fade for him as well.


The following Monday was another brilliant cloudless day, and the morning sunlight found Colin in his new office, unpacking the cartons of books he'd carried up the steps from the trunk of his battered black Ford sedan--a recent purchase encouraged by his move to an area of the country where a car was a far more important part of life than it was in New York City.
The small office that was now his contained one battered metal desk and matching file cabinet, an ancient oak desk chair on squeaky rollers and a matching one that stood on four uneven legs, several metal bookshelves that edged the room, and one balky window with a dusty Venetian blind. The walls werepainted a glossy greenish beige that managed to clash with the worn brown linoleum tiles on the floor.
Colin had been assured that this furniture was only temporary--that better furniture was on order, and that in fact it was rumored that the entire department would be moving to better quarters soon, but Colin placed little credence in these hopeful reports. In his experience, there was little in this world or the next so permanent as a temporary situation.
But his current quarters weren't that bad, in Colin's opinion. Once his books were on the shelves, and he'd hung the bulletin board and a few pictures, the place would look as inviting as such places ever did. It was a place where he could do his work, and the students who came to him for help and guidance would be more interested in their own problems than in how his office was decorated.
Colin had spent the last several days filling out the endless reams of forms that academia seemed to require in order to sanction every action, meeting his new colleagues in the Psych Department, and orienting himself to the vast Berkeley campus. Registration was going on elsewhere on the campus, and classes would begin next Monday. Colin's fellow instructors had assured him that the worst of the confusion would be over by the end of September, when the late arrivals and the Drop/Adds had settled their schedules.
Colin's own schedule looked as if it would be equally busy, at least for the first two semesters. Parapsychology I and II and the Introduction to Psychology course (all the new hires were forced to teach it, or so Colin had been told) were already full. Add to that the usual load of extracurricular activities for which he'd be expected to stand as faculty advisor, and he wouldn't have any more time to brood. He'd be lucky if he had time to think.
"Hello--hello--hello! Anyone home?" a breezy voice called from the doorway.
Colin turned.
"Alison!" he cried delightedly.
Alison Margrave was a regal theatrical woman in her early sixties, a professional psychologist--and parapsychologist--and musician who was one of Colin's oldest friends. She was dressed in her usual flamboyant, gypsyish fashion, wearing a long red wool cape over her blouse and skirt. When she threw the cape over a chair, he could see that Alison was wearing one of her trademark shawls, a colorful weave of muted earth tones secured with a large silver brooch set with an enormous intaglio-cut amethyst. The stone matched the purple of the amethysts in the silver combs that held back her sweeping mane of white hair.
"Well, at least you're glad to see me!" she growled good-naturedly. "Almost a year, Colin, and not a blessed word from you--"
He'd meant to call her once he was settled in the Bay Area, but had kept letting mundane tasks get in his way.
"How did you find me?" Colin asked sheepishly. "I know I wrote you I'd be coming ... ."
"And that was back in January, and by now I thought you'd probably gotten lost somewhere around Kansas and never gotten here at all," Alison teased. "Fortunately, I have my spies on campus. So I thought I'd see the late Colin MacLaren for myself--and bring you a sort of housewarming present." She advanced into the office and placed a small wrapped package on Colin's desk.
"I was going to call you this week," Colin protested, sitting down behind the desk and waving Alison to the other chair.
When she was seated--her eyes sparkling with youthful mischief despite her age--Colin began searching his pockets for his familiar companion, a battered old briar pipe. Once he'd located it and tapped the dottle into the battered metal wastebasket, he began rummaging for tobacco and matches.
"I was over here on business in any event," Alison said kindly, letting him off the hook. "So you needn't look so self-conscious, Colin. But I did want a chance to catch up on things. How have you been? It's been years since I've seen you in the flesh, you know."
Quick as a snapshot, a fierce vivid memory intruded itself on Colin's mind: the air was thick with incense, and he stood withfour others before the high altar of a church whose roof had been thrown open to the sky by American bombers. His white robe was stiff with the embroidered signs of his Lodge and Grade, he wore the crown and breastplate of Adepthood, and in his hand he bore the silver stave entwined with emerald and scarlet serpents. All these things were mere display: the exoteric representation of his inward nature: Priest and Adept of the Path.
There, beneath the canopy of starry heaven, he and those others from every Order and Lodge that claimed the Light as its goal--most of whose mundane names he did not even know--worked as surgeons to cleanse the land of the dark taint that still lingered over its landscape like a poisonous fog.
The sharp memory faded, and he was back in his office at Berkeley with Alison. If she knew where his mind had gone in those brief seconds, she gave no sign, but Colin knew that the memories were there for her, too. That night had contained a moment of supreme self-sacrifice, an apotheosis that a man--or woman--might spend the rest of his life attempting to recapture.
There were times when Colin wondered if perhaps that one moment of battle as a warrior of the Light had not done him as much harm as his oversoul had suffered in generations of war against the Dark. The way and the goal of the Path was peace--but the fatal flaw of all their mortal kind was the delight they took in war.
"Colin?" Alison's voice jarred him rudely back to the here and now.
"I was just thinking about Berlin," he said.
Alison's face softened at the memory. "It was a long time ago, you know," she said gently.
No it wasn't! his heart cried silently. He could remember the date exactly: October 31, 1945. Fifteen years ago next month.
"You're right," he said aloud. "Sometimes it seems hard to believe this is the same world as that was," he added.
"It isn't," Alison said with a smile. "And thank the Light for that. We may not have slain the serpent, my dear, but we've certainlybroken its back. It will be a long time before that particular ugliness rears its head again," she said positively.
"Let it be so," Colin said automatically. He shook himself loose from the ghosts of the past with an effort and smiled at Alison. Though she was not a member of his own Order, Alison was one of Colin's fellow Lightworkers, and knew as well as anyone did the peculiar ghosts that haunted him. "But tell me about yourself, Alison. What have you been doing?"
"Well," Alison began, as Colin tamped tobacco into his pipe, "you know I've got that old place--Greenhaven--over in San Francisco. I don't think you've ever seen it--an old Victorian; you'll love it--it's just off Haight Street by a few blocks and I can pick lemons right off the tree. I'v