A Darker Place

by Laurie R. King

  It was tempting to stay within reach of this unexpected oasis and use the anticipation of what the cook would do with other diner staples—chicken-fried steak, say, and apple pie à la mode—as a means of getting through the heater repairs (standing with her head in Rocinante’s innards and her backside hanging out in the snow). However, it was not to be; much better to make use of the repairs later, when they could become something more than mere repairs.

  With a sigh, Anne dropped a tip on the table, carried her tab to the register, and pushed back out into the winter.

  Even with long underwear, her new yellow recycled-soda-bottle pullover, a padded jacket, wool hat, and gloves, the cold was pervasive, and Anne stopped every hour to thaw her fingers over a cup of wayside coffee.

  The original plan, Glen’s plan, had been for her to pass through the town of Prescott and meet her local contact there. However, vague memory told her that Prescott was at a considerably greater altitude than the road she was on now, and a parking-lot conversation with some tourists getting out of a snow-laden camper had confirmed that yes, Prescott was picturesquely deep in snow. However, the couple assured her that the roads were clear and safe all the way to Phoenix, and urged her not to miss the experience. It was an appointment she had in mind, not an experience, but she thanked them anyway.

  She did, after all, have chains for the tires, as well as warm blankets and plenty of food if she got stuck, and although she would have welcomed a real excuse to bypass the local agent who was charged with keeping an eye on her, she thought a few inches of snow a coward’s way out.

  So she drove to Prescott and found it as pretty as advertised, although the snow in the streets was treacherous, its fresh white purity concealing frozen slush and a substratum of slick ice from an earlier melt. She negotiated a parking place and picked her cautious way into the designated place of meeting, and found a table.

  Her contact arrived before her coffee did. He was even younger than she had thought when she spotted him through the steamed-up window of his car in the street outside, and she watched without enthusiasm as he came in the door and ran an elaborately casual eye over the crowded restaurant before doing a theatrical double take at the sight of her. He pasted a look of astonishment onto his fresh young face as he wound through the tables in her direction. An actor, he wasn’t.

  He greeted her by her new name, saying his own as if reminding her of it while he pumped her hand up and down and expressed his pleasure and surprise at seeing her in Prescott. He looked about nineteen, red-haired, jug-eared, earnest, and eager to get things right, and she hadn’t the heart to tell him that probably half the people in the room knew that he was the local FBI man.

  Instead, she played her part. She invited him to sit down and maintained her side of the meaningless conversation until he was satisfied that the neighboring tables had no interest in them, at which point he lowered his voice to get down to business. It did not take long to reassure him that yes, she had his phone number memorized; yes, she would call for help if she needed it; yes, she knew how to keep in touch with Glen; and no, she did not need anything. She took a few minutes to explain to him just what she wanted: no interference, no drop-ins, no clever surveillance. His disappointment was profound, but with the authority of Glen McCarthy behind her, she was satisfied that he would not try to put together his own operation behind her back. She relaxed and thanked him nicely, and told him again that she would definitely call if she needed anything at all. Then she left him to pay the tab.

  Anne shambled out of the restaurant feeling like a curmudgeon—no, like a bear: a vastly experienced, irritable, wily old bear disturbed too early from a winter’s sleep. She climbed behind the wheel, and paused to tug Rocinante’s stained mirror around. Same old lines on her face, same new brutal haircut on her head; she made a face into the mirror, baring her teeth and growling at her misted reflection. Where on earth did the government find so many fresh-faced youngsters? she asked herself sourly, reaching down to turn the key, waiting for Rocinante’s engine to rattle into life. And why do they all have to be so damned cute?

  Christ, Anne, she thought. Don’t be disgusting. What the hell is wrong with you?

  It was at that point that she realized that something was awry. Sardonic self-criticism and easy mild profanity should not be her response; those were straight from the voice of Anne Waverly, and Anne had no business here. Ana Wakefield was proving very tardy in taking her place behind Rocinante’s wheel.

  Anne sat in the bus, not aware that the engine was running, staring unseeing at the cracked plastic of the steering wheel and searching internally for the person she had once been: interested, gentle, patient, contemplative Annie, now Ana, a Seeker who believed rather than analyzed, who was open to ideas, not cynical about motivations, concerned with the individual and the immediate, not with patterns and theories.

  Ana had to take over; it was as simple as that. There was no way Anne Waverly could act the part in Change without endangering herself and others, because it would be an act, and obvious, and dangerous as hell.

  Gradually, imperceptibly, her fingers and toes grew colder and her breathing rate slowed, and the analytical scholar she had forged, through defense as much as inclination, took a small step back, and then another. Ana Wakefield was born in that bus in the snow, as curiosity began to awaken.

  First off, she had to forget the details. She had never heard of Steven Change, never seen an aerial photograph of the Arizona compound or a photocopy of its building application, never reviewed the community’s Web site or studied its tax returns. These were all things she should not know; that would only trip her up and get in the way of her innocence.

  Instead of facts, she had to concentrate on how she felt about Change, to open herself up and make her mind receptive to its nuances. She already had the impression of Change as a growing, energetic, interesting group of people with a strong leader filled with original ideas. Yes, she knew that Glen had reservations, and yes, an ex-member had complained at great length about the secrecy and limitations he had encountered, but that did not explain the almost excessive openness the community displayed when it came to the school or to visitors to its frequent retreat sessions, nor did it account for the presence of a number of educated, intelligent people—a professor of economics, a doctor, several schoolteachers, and a rabbi—who had dropped out of their former lives to join the community. Granted, even the most critical of minds could become gullible, open to the point of emptiness when confronted by the mumbo jumbo of another discipline. And she could not forget that boy’s odd and disturbing nightmare drawing of the man in the giant pear-shaped drop surrounded by monsters. Still, Change promised to be sufficiently complex to be interesting.

  Who knew? Ana might even learn something there.

  Ana became aware that she was sitting in Rocinante staring out at the plowed drifts of snow, and had been for some time. She shook herself mentally and reached for wheel and gearshift, then hastily drew back her bare hands and patted her pockets until she found her gloves. Once they were on, she put Rocinante into first gear, drove out of the parking lot, and turned toward Jerome.

  It began to snow along the narrow, mountainous road, but the fat flakes seemed to be blowing about rather than sticking, so she pressed on. The flurries dove toward her hypnotically, a moving tunnel she was driving into. Oncoming cars startled her with their nonchalant speed, but she was also encouraged by their presence—if they contained irritated drivers forced to return by a road closure ahead, one of them anyway would surely give her some sign as to the hopelessness of her progress.

  Trees and sheer cliffs and the infinitely reassuring white lines of the road made up Ana’s world, and she started singing to herself as a means of keeping alert and talking aloud to Rocinante about the camber and slope of the surface, the unseen depths off to their right, the speed of the oncoming madmen, and the weather.

  Coming around one sharp and completely blind turn, she was plunged into
icy horror when her entire windshield was suddenly filled with a Winnebago out of Minnesota, its driver trying to avoid the overhanging cliffs by driving along the centerline. She slapped her hand onto the horn and her foot gingerly on the brakes, bracing for the impact. The driver of the tin box seemed to think her panic unjustified; he clamped his hand onto his own horn in reply, drowning out Rocinante’s thin wail, and pulled his vehicle just enough to the right that they passed each other with nothing more than a tap on the back of Rocinante’s side mirror and a certain momentary insecurity of the right-hand tires.

  Ana furiously rolled down the window and shook her fist at the behemoth, but he was already around a corner, gone from sight, and the only recipients of her indignation were the equally frustrated drivers of the mud-stained pickups and four-wheel-drive vehicles caught behind the man from Minnesota. Ana rolled up the window, shivering from the combination of cold and adrenaline, and deliberately forced her mind back to the road ahead.

  With her eyes on the pavement, fighting to separate what she needed to see from the constant distraction of the swirling snowflakes, she noticed nothing else of interest the rest of the way down from the mountains aside from a handful of small waterfalls and one valiantly blooming shrub, its pink blossoms looking a bit stunned against the gray stone and white snow.

  The small town of Jerome, perched on a steep hill above the mines that had given birth to it, was a welcome interruption as well as being a sign that the worst of the drive was over—and indeed, by the time she was actually in town, the snow had turned to a dull rain. Her target was Sedona, just a few miles away, but she decided to stop here and piece her nerves back together. She parked alongside the road, careful to turn the wheels into the curb, pulled her knit hat down across her ears, and got out.

  The air was magnificent, clean and cold and damp and fragrant. She could smell smoke from well-seasoned firewood, and wet dog from the recesses of the porch behind her, and a faint waft of pipe tobacco. A symphony of odors, but standing out, clear as two instruments in a duet, came the fragrances of fresh coffee and hot chili peppers. She turned, smiling, and went into the café.

  An hour later, when she came back out onto the street, she was warm inside and out, her nose still running from the spice in the chili. She tugged on her wool hat, got in behind the wheel, and launched Rocinante’s nose downhill, out of the mountains toward the Mecca of the New Age, the town of Sedona.

  CHAPTER 8

  From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

  Sedona had changed, dramatically. Drastically, even. When Anne and Aaron had spent the summer driving from the East Coast to grad school in Berkeley the year before they were married, they had spent a couple of days hiking the red-rock cliffs and sleeping beside Oak Creek. She remembered that some of the New Age residents had talked about the recent “discovery” of metaphysical vortices, the earth’s “power points,” but for the most part the town was simply another quiet artists’ community, supported by visitors from Flagstaff and Phoenix and a growing population of retirees attracted by the clear air, the cooler summers, and the stunning beauty of the area. Now the only thing that made her certain it was the same place was the unchanging arrangement of red cliffs, dark with the rain, that looked down on the town. Ana had reckoned that differences would be apparent. The phenomenal growth of New Age ideas over the last twenty years had put Sedona on the map of must-sees for the crystal, aura, and alien-abduction sets. Somehow, though, she had visualized the changes along the lines of longhairs camped along the road selling each other moonstones and tie-dyed T-shirts; she was unprepared for the great clusters of expensive new homes with picture windows looking out on the vortex-bearing rock upthrusts, and for the sprawl of motels, drugstores, and—God!—car dealerships.

  Not until the far end of town did Ana begin to recognize a few buildings, and by then she was so put off by this blatant defilement of Anne’s past that she drove on through and out of town, heading up the precipitous Oak Creek road that proved blessedly free of the intrusions of civilization. After a few miles, she pulled over into a wide spot, cut the engine, and got out to look around her.

  Yes, she thought; this is where we slept, back there above that boulder. We’d been driving for hours and hours in the heat, and we got in at night, and couldn’t see a damn thing except by the headlights of Rocinante’s predecessor. In the morning Aaron got up and made us coffee on the pump-up campstove, and brought me a cup, and we made love in the zip-together sleeping bags. Afterward, there was a blue jay sitting on that branch there, that very branch (although the tree was smaller then), and it flew away when we began to laugh. Aaron always said that morning was when Abby was conceived, and I never argued with him, even though I knew it was ten days later, on our first night in the apartment in Berkeley.

  Cars went by on the road, pickups and delivery trucks from Flagstaff and RVs from Montana, but Ana heard only the wooded silence of that distant day and the familiar low, loving groan of the man who was going to be her husband; it was cold, but she felt only the cool air of an early summer’s morning on her face and the faint imprint of a pair of rather poorly made elkskin boots beneath her feet, high elkskin moccasin boots worn by a young woman with long hair, a woman who had not only a full scholarship, but a man who adored her and a life opening up before her.

  Ah, Annie, she said to the young woman giggling in the sleeping bag with her man’s rough black beard buried in her neck; Annie, it’s God’s true blessing that we cannot see our future, because we’d never be able to bear it, if we had any warning.

  The blare of an air horn brought her back to herself, and she looked up to find the red cliffs dim behind low, wet clouds.

  She stood for a moment longer to look down at the spot where the tent had been. Good-bye, Annie, she said. Good-bye, Aaron. Enjoy each other. Cherish your daughter. Be grateful for the life you have left.

  Despite the cold drizzle, Sedona was bustling with the incongruous life of commerce. On this side of the town, however, it seemed more familiar, a place of galleries and coffeehouses instead of supermarkets and garages, the vehicles at the curbs leaning more toward mud-spattered four-wheel-drives and less to shiny travel trailers. Ana slowed to allow a family in bright, worn anoraks to scuttle across the road in front of her, then pulled into a parking place between a muddy Willy’s Jeep with a bumper sticker that declared FRANKLY MY DEAR I DON’T GIVE A DAM and a newish Mercedes with a window sticker showing three almond-eyed aliens. Rocinante’s om mandala fit right in.

  For the better part of two hours, she wandered up and down the street, in and out of shops, smiling at the locals and talking to the shopkeepers. She bought a delicate blue crystal on a deerskin thong, a pair of thick wool socks made in Ecuador, three slim books on Sedona, and a newspaper, which she took into a small café that seemed to cater mostly to scruffy vegetarians rather than the polished tourist classes. She ordered a latte and a slice of apple pie from the waitress, a girl with thick black braids, two gold studs in her nose, and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a Tibetan lotus blossom on it, and then she opened the paper to immerse herself in the printed word and the overheard conversations of the locals.

  The coffee was very good, the whole wheat crust on the pie less successful, and the news and conversation had more to do with small-town politics and economics than with the otherworldly considerations Sedona was known for. True, the couple at the next table was earnestly discussing the miraculous reappearance of a medicine wheel a week after the local parks department had kicked the earlier one apart, scattering the rock design in all directions, but the six people gathered around the table in back of her were involved in a vigorous debate concerning the area south of town around the Chapel of the Holy Cross, and although the New Age books in the bag next to Ana’s elbow had told her that the Chapel had been built (all unknowing) on the site of a powerful vortex, the four bearded men and two flannel-shirted women were more interested in the sewage problems involving the houses being cons
tructed in that area and the need for a traffic light where the access road met the highway.

  It was very comfortable, this snug little coffeehouse with its woodstove, dark walls, and the amateur paintings of red-rock buttes done in a realistic style alternating with visionary depictions of those same rocks psychedelically glowing with the energy of a vortex. The air inside smelled of wet clothing and baked goods and was filled with low music, the clatter of pans in the kitchen, and the hum of voices discussing matters of no earthly interest to her. She felt at home here, just one more aging refugee from the sixties, with no lecture’s, no papers to read or to write, no Glen watching over her shoulder. All she lacked was a dog to lie across her feet, and she suspected that if she poked her head into the kitchen and asked, she’d even be provided with one of those.

  Ana smiled into the dregs of foam in her glass, tipped it back to allow the coffee-stained island of foam to slide slowly down into her mouth, and put it down with a small sigh. She was of an age to know that a person had to take her pleasures when and how they came, and not to grasp after them as they faded. Sitting here had been very pleasant, but it did not, as her grandfather used to say, pay the bills.

  The tip Ana left, nearly matching the size of the amount she owed for her latte and pie, was her offering of thanks to the resident deity responsible for this moment of calm. Restored, she buttoned her jacket, pulled her hat down over her brief hair, and went back out into the street.

  The rain had let up, though low clouds still hid the taller of the surrounding hills. Rocinante was not far away, but Ana was not about to get back on her mount and ride away, attractive as the thought might be, for five doors down from the café lay the Changing Earth Crafts Gallery, the shop that had been her circuitous goal during the entire afternoon.

  She started in the direction of the shop that Change ran, glancing in the windows of the intervening shops with no intention of entering any of them until all her attention was seized by a small display of silver jewelry arranged across a length of dark brown velveteen. Most of the pieces were conventional enough—arching dolphins and delicate fairies—but one piece caught her and would not let her go.