Authors: Laurie R. King
Only she did not come through the other side. Her boots caught on the roof of the gap, and she was stuck. There was no space above her body to allow her to turn her hips, so her knees could not bend and find purchase for her boots; there was no way to bring her arms down to push herself back up the slope, because the sides were too narrow. Her fingers could find nothing to grab onto above her head: She was trapped in the rock with no way to push or pull herself back up the slope, and she could hear the man behind her preparing to launch himself after her, but when she tried to draw a deep breath to call for help, the rock pushed down on her chest, and she could feel the horror of being enveloped rising up in her and—
She jolted awake, drenched in sweat, the implacable pressure of the rock face pressing against her trapped boots, and tingling up the front of her helpless legs. It was one of the most gruesome dreams she had ever experienced, and she had to get up and walk up and down, rubbing at the front of her legs before the sensation of entrapment left her.
There would be no sleep after that.
What she badly needed was either a long walk or a trashy novel, but she could not go out and she would have bet that such a thing did not exist under this roof. Instead, she sat down on her hard chair and opened her diary by the light of the floods, and forced herself to concentrate on an elaborate drawing of the abbey ruins.
After three botched efforts, the immediacy of the dream faded a little, and the drawing became easier. Eventually she turned to draw a boojum tree, and although
it occurred to her that the mysterious snark might well live in a low gash in a rock tunnel, the image did not come to life, and she continued to draw lizards and rocks and even, thinking of Jason, a cat.
She was deep into her pointless labors when a small sound knocked her out of her artistic reverie, a noise both unfamiliar and disconcertingly reminiscent of some evil experience. She strained to hear over the sudden pounding in her ears, and waited for it to come again.
When the sound was repeated, she knew instantly why it had acted like a cattle prod on her distracted mind. She covered the distance to the door in two steps, yanked it open, and looked down at Dulcie, in pink-flowered nightgown and bare feet. She had her teddy bear in her arms, and she didn’t look cold; other than that, it was all terribly familiar. She pulled the child inside and closed the door.
“What’s the matter, Dulcie?” she said in a low voice.
“They took Jason again,” the child whimpered. “He told me to be a big girl and go back to sleep, but I can’t.”
Ana shushed her rising voice and gave her a brisk hug. “That’s fine, Dulcie. I told you to come here anytime, and I’m glad you did. Now, why don’t you hop into my bed and see if you can follow Jason’s advice?”
“Not Jason,” the child said, obediently climbing up into Ana’s bed.
“Jason didn’t tell you to go back to sleep, you mean? Then who was it?”
“That Man.”
“Jonas? You mean Jonas came to get your brother?”
“With the loud man.” Ana identified this second person without difficulty as Marc Bennett.
“That’s okay,” she said, though she feared it would not be. “We’ll settle it like we did before. Now, night-night.”
“But where are you going to sleep?” Dulcie asked.
Ana looked at the hard wooden chair and the hard wooden floor, and in the end she pulled up the blankets and got in next to Dulcie. The child curled up and snuggled into Ana with a grunt of contentment. Slowly, deliberately, Ana brought her arm up and wrapped it around the thin, warm body next to her.
“Ana?”
“Yes, Dulcie.”
“I’m scared.”
“What, because of Jason?” The wild mop of black hair nodded beneath Ana’s chin. “Don’t be, sweetheart. It’s like before, he’s gone to do some work, only this time it’s with Jonas instead of Steven. Big boys have work to do.”
“He was scared, too.”
“Jason was?” Surprising, how normal her voice sounded, how little concerned, when her gut was clenched around a block of ice.
“He pretended he wasn’t, but he was. I can tell.”
“I’ll bet you can.”
“He was scared before, when Thomas and Danny came and got him,” the child continued inexorably, the words pushed out of her by fear for her brother. “He was scared, and when he came back he wouldn’t tell me what happened, but it made him have bad dreams, and Jason doesn’t usually have bad dreams, not like me. And now they took him away again and he was even more scared than he was before.”
She lay in Ana’s embrace, waiting desperately for adult reassurance that it was going to be all right, and Ana struggled to find an answer to give her. She never lied to a child if she could possibly avoid it, and she did not want to lie to Dulcie now. For one thing, she knew how good children were at picking up unspoken messages, and she doubted that giving Dulcie any more reassuring words crossed with the pheromones of dread
would help matters at all. On the other hand, it was cruel to burden a young person with adult weakness and doubt just when strength was needed most.
In the end, she gave Dulcie a squeeze and told her, “Dulcinea, I don’t know what’s going on either, but as soon as people are up and around, I’ll find out. I’m with you, Dulcie. You’re not alone.”
That seemed to be the right approach, or at least one adequate enough to allow the child eventually to relax back into the safety of sleep.
Not the adult, though. There were no words reassuring enough to quiet the bone-deep trembling Ana could feel inside. Spiritual hypothermia, she diagnosed, striving for humorous detachment; optimal treatment to include a familiar woodstove, two dogs, and the warm company of friends. Although at this point she would settle even for Glen’s icy presence—anything but to be there alone with deadly decisions before her.
She was jamming herself down between a rock and a hard place, to be sure, but she was also standing on a high wire, balancing over two abysses.
On the one side was Jason, who was a part of her in ways she could not begin to understand, and who at that moment, while Ana lay with the limp figure of his sister clasped to her, might well be staring at the dim interior of a second metal alembic—this time under the far-from-gentle protection of Marc Bennett and Jonas Seraph.
On the other side lay the massive responsibility she had for this community. The physician’s oath to Do no harm was paramount in every aspect of the work she did with Glen. It infused her daily life while in the communities she investigated with the urgent need to tread lightly, to slip into a preset role and slip out again, leaving no trace. Her work for Glen had always been based on the idea that the long-term effect was the only goal,
the larger good more important than the individual. In earlier cases, her heart had occasionally ached at the mistreatment, as she saw it, of the community’s children or one of the adults who found himself to be a round peg faced with a square doctrinal hole, but she had rarely succumbed to the temptation to interfere, knowing that in the long run, Glen and his agency would sort it out. Uncomfortable and uncertain as she might be about Glen, when it came down to it, she trusted him. He would do what was needed.
Now the question was turned around on her. Jason’s welfare was at stake here, and it appeared to demand an immediate and aggressive action that Glen was not there to provide. But, could she trust her own judgment? The persistent intrusion of Anne Waverly’s past and personality into the body and actions of Ana Wakefield, the increasing incursions of memory that had come to a head in yesterday’s devastatingly real flashback, were confusing her. She was aware of a constant jittery anxiety focused on the two children, and she worried that Anne’s frantic concern for the boy was severely hindering Ana’s ability to remain the passive, open-minded individual she desperately needed to be. It was obvious to the rational side of her mind that she was well and truly losing it, hagridden by the specters of her past just at the time she most needed to be clearheaded and objective.
Long, long ago, when a thirty-year-old Anne Waverly entered the university graduate program eighteen years before, she had begun by building a persona on the wreckage of her former life. She had paved over the rubble, sealed up the debris of catastrophe with the clear, hard shell of academic discipline. When that cracked a bare three years after it had been laid down, when the snapshot of Abby had rumbled through her and pitched her into the darker corners of her mind, what had dragged her out again was Glen, who happened
along to use her and bully her and incidentally show her the way to survival: to split herself into two persons, one rooted in either side of the events of Texas, two individuals whose only point of joining was the bridge crossing into an investigation, and later leaving it.
Now that bridge was disintegrating, cracked in a hundred places, and the events of the past were welling up out of the dark abyss beneath her. Marla Makepeace, no doubt, would be jubilant, considering it a healing and whole-making event; to Ana it felt like being overtaken by birth pangs in a collapsing building. She had to control the process, just for long enough to get out and into safety. She simply could not afford it now. Jason and Dulcie could not afford it.
She must have tightened her grip on the child, because Dulcie stirred briefly, then subsided.
So, could she trust herself in this state? Her mind was urging caution and rationality, forcing her to admit that the individual threats she had seen here did not necessarily add up to the sort of desperate scenario her inner eye was putting together: An antagonistic attitude toward the authorities, a man in the woods carrying a shotgun, a titular leader who was thinly connected with reality, and a de facto leader who was overly full of himself. That was it. Everything else came from her and her strange ties to two children, and all of it was tainted by her own past. Dulcie reminded her of Abby—that was where the cracks had begun. And then Bennett looked like Martin Cranmer, and the woods made her nervous, and by the time the pantry and the communal phobia about outsiders entered into the equation, she was so sensitized to parallels that a particular brand of pencil would take on an ominous significance. She had no business being there, no right to jeopardize everything by making decisions that could be based only on irrationality.
The best thing for everyone would be if she were to stand up and walk away from the compound.
Leaving behind Jason in his alembic.
Abandoning Dulcie to strangers.
They would survive, her mind insisted. They would be fine.
But her gut, her heart, her every instinct cried out that here and now, the rational decision would be the wrong one, that the long-term goal was just too far away. There were times when the expedient solution was not the right one, when only faith justified an action—educated and open-eyed faith if possible, but if that failed, blind faith would have to do.
There was, in truth, no choice to be made.
The deep trembling had subsided while she wrestled with her demon, and with that final realization, that a decision had made itself, she actually drifted into sleep for a while, free at last of the tension of being of two minds. When she woke, the harsh blue glare of the floodlights pressing at her curtains had given way to the gentle rose light of dawn, and she was not the same person who had lain down on this bed the night before.
“My name is Anne Waverly,” she whispered into the room. For better or for worse, Ana was gone, and when she went to the toilet down the hallway and moved to the sink to wash her hands, she half expected to see a woman with hair curling onto her shoulders. Instead, the same crop-haired woman looked back at her, although her eyes were calm and her face seemed older. She looked… satisfied.
Back in her room, Anne exchanged her sweatpants for jeans, took out a plain T-shirt for the upper half, and then thrust that back into the drawer and took out the small buckskin medicine pouch she had been forbidden to wear. She dropped it defiantly over her neck, and then pulled on a high-collared polo shirt to conceal the cord.
The sound of the drawer closing woke Dulcie, who sat up, blinking.
“Ana, are you going to find Jason?”
“We’re going to get you dressed, and then we’ll have breakfast, and then you’re going to the schoolroom—no, today is Saturday, isn’t it? Well, we’ll find something for you to do, and after that yes, I’ll go and see if anyone knows about Jason. But, sweetie, I think it would be best if you didn’t say anything about Jason to anyone else for a little while. Some of the work that people do is kind of private, and they might not think it was a good idea if I tried to find out what Jason is doing. Okay?”
Dulcie nodded solemnly. One thing her past had taught her was the importance of not blabbing to adults.
Dressed and scrub-faced and downstairs with their bowls of muesli, Anne spotted Sara and led Dulcie over to her table. Introductions were made and the topic of the weather disposed of, and then Anne asked Sara about her plans for the day. The dining room was noisy and Anne, sitting next to Sara, pitched her voice low. Dulcie, concentrating on slicing a banana for her cereal, did not even look up.
“I’ll be working in the runner beans most of the day,” Sara told her. “You know, down near the stream?”
Anne nodded; the field was at the far end of the clear area from the house, an ideal place for Dulcie today. Keeping her voice low, she said to Sara, “I wonder if you’d mind having a small helper for the morning? I have to do some Work, but I should be finished by lunch.”
One way or another
, a quiet voice in the back of her head added. “She’s a good little girl and I’m sure she wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“Sure, no problem. I’d be happy to have someone help me weed. Dulcie,” she said across the table, “do you know the difference between a baby bean plant and a weed?” Dulcie shook her head doubtfully and Sara
laughed. “That’s quite all right, dear. It’s a skill many adults haven’t mastered either, but something tells me you’ll catch on in a flash. Finish your breakfast, my dear, and then we’re off to rescue the runner beans from the weeds. See you at lunch, Ana.”