A Darker Place (32 page)

Also, she admitted to the flock of small gray birds that had settled around her, Steven’s superiority grated on her. Ana liked to win as much as the next person, and during these investigations it pleased her, tickled some deep part of her nature, to know that she held the upper hand—even if her opponent never found out about it and the only person to appreciate her was Glen. Steven was a prig and it would be a pleasure to undermine him; that alone would be justification enough.

Most important, though, was the niggling suspicion that there was something funny about Change. She caught the thought and it made her laugh aloud, startling a small desert iguana that had settled down near her boot. Come on, Ana: What could possibly be funny about a community whose belief system was based on the manipulation of atomic structure to transmute material? Sure, medieval alchemists had believed in the possibility of creating gold from lead, but they had no means of testing, no analytical apparatus capable of distinguishing true gold from sulfurous mercury. To find seventeenth-century ideas coexisting with silicon chips, electron microscopes, and the robotic exploration of Mars said a great deal about man’s deep need to believe that he had some control over his environment. Witchcraft, magic, and alchemy. No funnier than a belief in a personal God, was it?

Still, there was something she didn’t understand yet about Change, some group dynamic she didn’t have her finger on. Something told her that it was represented by Steven’s necklace. Something also told her that she would not find out by simply waiting to be told.

She got to her feet and slapped the dust from her rear end. She wanted to know what was literally underlying the Change community, and tonight she would see if she
could find out. Nothing dramatic, no blackened face and silken rappelling rope, just some judicious nosing about where she was not supposed to be. Ana Wakefield, after all, seemed to be the kind of pushy female who might well do that. If she was caught—well, she would tell them that she was nosy. Steven would believe that. But she would try very hard not to be caught.

When she got back to the compound, she went straight to her room, where she drank about half a gallon of water and stood under the shower for twenty minutes, feeling like one of those desert plants that unfurl from a state of desiccated hibernation with the rains. It was stupid to go out in the desert without water. A few weeks later in the year the consequences might have been serious, but the day had been cool and overcast and she emerged from the shower only slightly sunburned and a little trembly.

She put on clean clothes and went over to the dining hall, making straight for the serving line, where she filled a plate, put two large glasses of fruit juice onto her tray, and got to work on it. She did not look up from her dinner until half of the food was inside her, when she paused for a breath and a long drink of juice. She glanced distractedly around the room over the rim of the glass, still more interested in nourishment than in her surroundings, but she put the empty glass down slowly, and when she resumed her fork, she did so with the air of a person who is not really tasting her food.

At first she thought that her conversation with Steven had made the rounds and her precipitous introduction to the community’s secrets had set her apart. When she caught two of the members who wore silver chains around their necks staring at her, only to have them shift
their eyes and pointedly resume their conversations, she felt certain of it.

However, the other twenty or so other early diners neither wore necklaces nor seemed to find her worthy of attention, yet they, too, seemed subdued, even troubled. She appeared to be the only person in the room with an appetite.

She finished her food and cleared her dishes, but instead of leaving them in the trays she took them on through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. Suellen and another woman were there, already up to their elbows in soapsuds, and Amelia (who shot her the same speculative look that she had received from the two initiates outside) was spooning the last of the food into the stainless steel warming trays. Ana put her plate among the stack on Suellen’s right, and then reached for a single rubber glove to help out, pulling it onto her good hand with her teeth.

“Man,” she said, “it’s so quiet out there, I thought I was too late for supper. Did something happen?”

“You didn’t hear?” Suellen asked.

“I was gone most of the day.”

“Some of the children in England have been taken away.” Her voice was both genuinely troubled and secretly cherishing being the bearer of bad news, which Ana had counted on.

“Taken away?” Ana exclaimed. “Do you mean they’ve been kidnapped?”

“By the government.”

“What?”

“What Suellen means,” said Amelia’s disapproving English accent from behind them, “is that Social Services has got involved in a custody dispute between one of the members and her ex-husband and has temporarily removed the two children while the accusations of the father
are being investigated. It has happened before.” And, her voice clearly said, it would happen again.

“Still,” said Ana, “it sounds unpleasant for the mother.”

“Unpleasant, yes, but hardly the end of the world,” Amelia said repressively.

They had to wait until Amelia left the kitchen, but when she did, Suellen was happy to fill Ana in. The chief trouble, it appeared, came about because although the mother was British, the father who was trying to pry his children free from the hold of the “cult” was an American. The dual citizenship of the boy and girl confused matters no end and, being a disgruntled ex-member of Change himself, the father was more than willing to drag in every authority he could, from Social Services and the American embassy to the tabloids. Not, Ana agreed, a pretty picture, but she had to agree with Amelia that it would probably quiet down in a few days, particularly if the British authorities had the sense to play it low key.

She worked one-handed alongside the other two Women, carrying in plates and wiping surfaces until they had finished the heaps of pans, and then she fixed herself a cup of tea (one of the perks of working in the kitchen) and went to use the toilet before the evening meditation.

Steven began his talk by mentioning the situation in England. He sounded untroubled, though, and his attitude proved contagious. The chant was a poetic image if an awkward phrase: “Boiling water, peaceful clouds.” When meditation was over, Ana slipped away and went to her room, and there to bed.

Setting the tiny alarm on her wristwatch for 2:00
A.M.

From “We Were All Once Cultists” by Anne M. Waverly,
in
Modern Religious Expression
, ed. Antony Makepeace,
University of California Press, 1989

The outside lights were shut down at midnight, except those along the road between the gate and the parking lot and one hanging from the front of the barn, the purpose of which Ana had not been able to figure out. The halls of the buildings remained lighted, but anyone who needed to negotiate the paths after that time was expected to use one of the wild assortment of flashlights that were kept near the outer doors.

Ana took her own, pencil-sized flashlight with her as she let herself out of the sleeping building.

She ducked into the shadows away from the door to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The night was clear and cold—not as cold as when she had first come to Change a month ago, but still with the crisp, dry temperature drop of the desert. A waning moon lay near the surrounding hills, casting enough light to give shape to the buildings now that her eyes were adapting, and enabling her side vision to pick out the white stones that edged the walkways. The sky was black from one horizon to the other with no city lights to dilute the hard brightness of the stars. In the distance, coyotes were chattering their eerie call at the moon, and one of the bats that lived among the eaves of the barn darted overhead.

Other than that, there was no sound, no movement.

Ana was wearing the thick Ecuadorian socks she had bought that first day in Sedona, which had the combined virtues of complete silence on the gravel and the innocent evocation of someone who couldn’t be bothered to put on her boots just for a brief nocturnal stroll. She also wore the dark blue sweatpants and sweatshirt she habitually slept in, and her hair was uncombed from the pillow.
The small flashlight in the pocket of her sweats was a natural thing for anyone to take on a restless-night excursion, and she carried nothing else except one crumpled tissue.

She stepped away from the dormitory and onto the path, winced as her heel came down on a sharp rock, then walked quickly across to the hub building. The austere planting of cactuses and shrubs looked alarmingly like men standing by the path. The boojum tree loomed large and pale, although she was expecting it, and it took some effort not to turn and check on the still figures as she went past them.

Inside the building, she scurried across the dimly lit foyer, feeling as exposed as a rabbit in headlights, and went through both sets of swinging doors into the meditation hall. There she paused, catching her breath. The room was pitch-black, with only the faintest light coming from right up at the top, where the moonlight on the translucent dome showed as a vague glow. She stood listening for a couple of minutes, and nearly leapt out of her skin when a small rustle and crackle came out of the dark not twenty feet away. Dry-mouthed and with pounding heart, she strained to hear, and when it came again she nearly laughed aloud in relief: It was the last coals in the suspended fireplace, collapsing in on themselves. She snapped on the flashlight, playing it around and above to confirm that she was alone, and then went forward to investigate.

The night she had come here looking for Jason she had approached the great central stem of the structure that supported the fireplace and Steven’s platform. She had pounded on it with her fist in anger, hoping for a loud echo to jolt Steven from his trance, but the dull thud it gave indicated a heavy degree of insulation inside the pipe. What she had only dimly noted at the time, but
which had returned to niggle at her, was that despite the insulation, the pipe had felt warm.

The fireplace above it could conceivably have sent its heat down along the base. It was, in fact, the most logical explanation. However, Ana had seen the original plans for this structure, submitted to the county planning department, and she was quite certain that there had been a partial basement included in the drawings. Heat could travel down from an overhead fire, yes, but heat more naturally traveled upward. Was there just a central heating boiler down beneath the meditation hall? Or was there something else?

An alchemical laboratory, perhaps?

Ana left the meditation hall and went back through the main foyer and into the school offices. She had been around the school long enough to know the handful of places where a door to the basement might be hidden. It was not in any of them: not in the back of the storage closet in Teresa’s office, not in the men’s rest room, not in the cluttered depths of the janitorial closet. She rather doubted that the entrance would involve ripping up the carpeting or rotating an entire wall with a secret switch, but she found herself pushing at the spines of the books on Teresa’s shelves, just in case the switch was hidden there. She made herself stop that pointless exercise: It was nearly three o’clock, and Change, with its combination of rural demands and long-distance workers, began to stir by five. She had no time to waste, and it did not seem that the entrance was here.

That left either the meditation hall or upstairs, and she had no wish to venture up among the sleeping authorities. She went back out to the school entranceway and from there into the great circular hall, and stood playing the beam of her light over the walls, thinking hard. After a minute, she started to climb the platforms up the side of the hall. At first she looked closely at the
walls, but then she stopped that and just climbed straight for the top, to the single seat that was higher than Steven’s, the platform she had never seen occupied. And there it was, a narrow rectangle built into the wall and concealed by the dim lighting, the wall hangings, and the reluctance of the Change members to venture beyond their proper places.