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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE - AVALON OF THE HEART

  ONE - BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1960

  TWO - BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, OCTOBER 1961

  INTERLUDE #1 - BERKELEY, 1961

  THREE - BERKELEY, NOVEMBER 3, 1961

  INTERLUDE #2 - BERKELEY, 1961

  FOUR - BERKELEY, 1962

  FIVE - SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, JUNE 1965

  INTERLUDE #3 - JUNE 1965

  SIX - BERKELEY, OCTOBER 1966

  SEVEN - SAN FRANCISCO, APRIL 1967

  INTERLUDE #4 - JUNE 1967

  EIGHT - BERKELEY, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 1968

  NINE - NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 1969

  INTERLUDE #5 - JULY 1969

  TEN - NEW YORK, AUTUMN 1972

  ELEVEN - NEW YORK, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 1972

  TWELVE - NEW YORK, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1972

  THIRTEEN - NEW YORK, DECEMBER 24, 1972

  FOURTEEN - SAN FRANCISCO, JANUARY 1973

  FIFTEEN - GLASTONBURY, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 1973

  INTERLUDE #6 - GLASTONBURY, SEPTEMBER 1979

  SIXTEEN - GLASTONBURY, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1979

  SEVENTEEN - SAN FRANCISCO, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 1983

  EIGHTEEN - SAN FRANCISCO, MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 1984

  NINETEEN - SAN FRANCISCO, FRIDAY, JUNE 1, 1984

  TWENTY - SAN FRANCISCO, 1985

  INTERLUDE #7 - SAN FRANCISCO, 1990

  TWENTY-ONE - SHADOWKILL, NEW YORK, MARCH 1990

  TWENTY-TWO - ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, MARCH 1990

  TWENTY-THREE - WITCH HILL, MASSACHUSETTS, SATURDAY, MAY 19, 1990

  INTERLUDE #8 - AUGUST 1990

  TWENTY-FOUR - SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1998

  TWENTY-FIVE - WASHINGTON, D.C., WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1998

  TWENTY-SIX - FAUQUIER COUNTY,VIRGINIA, MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1998

  TWENTY-SEVEN - GLASTONBURY, NEW YORK, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1999

  EPILOGUE - AND KING HEREAFTER

  TOR BOOKS BY MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  Copyright Page

  I would like to thank Rosemary Edghill, who has been instrumental in preparing this manuscript (as well as those of the three previous books in this series) for publication.

  “Thus, this single most inflammatory and crucial document of the Third Reich had its origins in that strange twilight world where occultism and espionage meet, a world we will visit again and again in the course of this study.”

  —PETER LEVENDA,

  UNHOLY ALLIANCE

  PROLOGUE

  AVALON OF THE HEART

  Move along these shades

  In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand

  Touch—

  —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  DID I LOVE COLIN MACLAREN? IT’S AN ODD QUESTION, BUT I suppose it is one that the world would have to ask, assuming it knew anything about either of us—or, for that matter, cared. Certainly he has been the one constant in my life, outlasting jobs, residences, and even my beloved Peter.

  I first met Colin when I was barely out of my teens, a young woman on her own for the first time in a world that has so changed over the last forty years that to a modern the 1960s might as well be a foreign country. It was a world where women knew their place, and kept to it for the most part—a world in which progress was inevitable and all change was for the best.

  We—America, the Allies—had won, so we believed then, the war against evil not so very long ago. It was that war that shaped the lives of the boom generation, though the conflict I and my sisters grew up hearing about was not World War II, but Korea. At the time both of them seemed honorable wars and decisive victories for what in those days we called “our way of life,” though as the years have passed, there have been arguments against both the justice and the finality, not only of those wars, but of Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the hundreds of smaller conflicts that have sprung up in every corner of the globe since.

  I do not think we shall ever truly know what “the last good war” meant to us until the last soldier of that conflict is buried and the last of the unquiet dead exhumed from their graves.

  Colin would say that knowing that you didn’t know was the beginning of wisdom … Colin MacLaren, my teacher and my friend. He was one of those who had been tempered in that great conflict—changed as so many of those who were to become the parents of my own stormy generation were, but in Colin the war and its aftermath had bred a terrible, fierce, and demanding love, a love too vast to hold any one woman—or man either—as its focus.

  Did I love Colin MacLaren? I truly no longer remember what I felt when I first saw him. But I do know that Colin MacLaren loved all mankind far too much ever to love me alone.

  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 in the 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 behind a 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 when Colin 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 whatever it 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 f
elt 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 and debt, 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.