Heartlight Read online

  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 transplanted Easterner 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 throu
gh 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 were painted 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 with four 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 certainly broken 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 pi
pe, “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’ve even got an herb garden now—you’ll remember that was always my ambition. A few years back I remodeled the old garage into a workspace; it’s useful to have a quiet place to meditate, now and again. Let me see: what else? I’ve been teaching; both musically and otherwise—there are a few people out there who are ready for something a bit stronger than parapsychology, so to speak. And of course I consult—but these days, people are more likely to complain of little green men than noisy spirits.”

  “Times change,” Colin agreed, touching flame to tobacco and sucking his pipe alight. “Ten years ago, I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever be back on a college campus, let alone teaching.”

  “Wait until you have your first classroom full of students,” Alison teased him, laughing. “You’ll understand why you came back to it, my boy! I wouldn’t give up teaching for all the kingdoms of the earth—but it’s hard to believe that either of us was ever as young as those students are!”

  “I wonder if we ever were?” Colin mused somberly. Sometimes the great gulf between what he had become and the innocents he was surrounded by seemed almost too much to bridge.

  Alison eyed him narrowly, cool appraisal in her warm grey eyes. “We were all young once, Colin,” she said gently, “just as we all age and die. And it is our responsibility to see that our knowledge of the Great Work does not die with us.”

  “I know, Alison,” Colin said reluctantly.

  She was telling him nothing he did not already know, and it was a situation that had concerned Colin ever since he had returned home. Every pilgrim on the Path, no matter how unfledged, had the responsibility to guide others in the direction of the Light to the best of his ability. For someone like Colin, who had followed the Path for many lifetimes, it was even more important that he find and teach his successor in the Great Work; another who could take his place to stand among the Hosts of the Army of the Light.