A Darker Place

by Laurie R. King

  “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.

  CHAPTER 20

  Modern Religious Expressions 85

  We Were All Once Cultists

  Anne M. Waverly

  Duncan Point University

  All religions were once new, and all established religious were once a brash hodgepodge of ideas and images snatched and cobbled together in an attempt to put revelation into words. The prophet Mohammed built his house on the foundations of The Book, using bricks made of his own native soil; Jesus the Messiah was a believing Jew with a new vision of man’s relationship with God; Judaism itself bears clear imprint of the people who worshipped in the land before they came, the psalms and images of Canaanite gods, even to the very shape of its Temple.

  Archaeologists glory in (and despair over) the immutability of stone and the thrifty habits of one generation of builders to make use of the decrepit structures of previous generations in building anew: Gravestones are turned into paving stones, inscribed triumphs reversed to become part of a blank wall, and Roman markers tumble out of a medieval wall under demolition. Theological historians take equal joy in the discoveries of one tradition taken up and used by another: a theophanic hymn to Yahweh that preserves the cadence of a song dedicated to the storm-god Baal; a set of characteristics-beard, tent, age, wisdom—that speak of the authority of the God of the Israelites which are also seen in the physical description of the Canaanite El; the Gilgamesh story and certain mythic elements in the Old Testament stories

  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.

  It was locked, but before climbing down to retrieve the key ring Teresa kept in her desk, Ana looked around for the equivalent of the key-under-the-doormat, and she found one, under Steven’s thick meditation pillow on the next step down. She used it to unlock the door, then put the key back where she had found it and pushed the door open.

  If it was dark in the meditation hall, the doorway was a black pit. She gingerly stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and switched on her flashlight. The steps were slightly tapered, narrower at the inner side to fit into the circular wall, but otherwise even and perfectly sound. They continued on, featureless, past the place where she estimated the floor of the hall lay, a gentle spiral leading into the depths. There were lights, but she stuck to the flashlight—no telling what else the light switch would turn on.

  The stairway ended at another narrow wooden door, this one unlocked. She nudged it open, and stepped into a medieval laboratory into which a computer had been dropped.

  The room seemed to be the same shape and size as the meditation hall overhead, but it seemed smaller because the ceiling was so low: If Steven were to give an uncharacteristic leap of enthusiasm down here, he would brain himself on the rough beams. The room was strewn with worktables and cluttered with equipment that ranged from shiny new glass beakers to crude redbrick furnaces with huge bellows leaning against their sides, but at the moment what took Ana’s attention was the object at the precise center of the circle and hence directly below the black pipe that rose out of the hall floor.

  It was a shiny, pear-shaped, potbellied… thing nearly the height of the room and perhaps six feet across its thickest part, made of some shiny metal like stainless steel or polished aluminum. Its smooth sides were punctuated by six large oval designs that did not quite meet, looking vaguely like seams. She examined the thing closely and decided that whereas five of the circles were indeed laid-on welding, the sixth one was meant to give way: There was a small, sturdy latch on the right-hand side.

  She pulled the Kleenex out of her pocket and, using it to keep her fingerprints from the shiny surface, wiggled the latch until it gave. The door drifted inward. She leaned inside and saw the same ovals repeated there. A large circular pad took up the middle of the object’s nearly flat bottom, but as far as Ana could see, there was no source of light.

  She bent over to thread herself through the door, and straightened up inside. “Ommm,” she tried softly, and the noise hummed and echoed around her. She smiled. This was, she guessed, a variation on the sensory deprivation tanks so popular with the human potential movement, although she had never before seen one that didn’t use warm salty water to induce the hypnotic feedback of the mind denied external stimuli. She had spent any number of hours in such tanks, finding them slightly claustrophobic but immensely restful.

  She climbed back out, refastened the latch, and made a circle of the room.

  Evenly spaced around the silver tank were the six small redbrick kilns or fireplaces. Their flues joined together in a six-pointed star just at the pear-shaped thing’s top—the source, no doubt, of the heat she had felt coming from the pipe the night Jason was missing. Next out from the furnaces were three long, battered workbenches, each with two workstations and situated so a person could move easily between bench and furnace. The benches were strewn with the ancient tools of a metallurgist or chemist: alembics, yes, as well as retorts and scales with weights ranging from the minute to the massive, mortars and pestles of various sizes and composition, scoops and pipettes, funnels and mallets, long-handled pincers and galvanized buckets, heavy gloves with high gauntlet tops, and an assortment of jewelers’ loupes, hammers, and tweezers. Actually, she realized, she had seen something very like it before, somewhere in Europe—Heidelberg, was it? Or Köln?—where an alchemical laboratory had been re-created for the benefit of the tourists.

  One section of wall had a bookshelf, sagging under the weight of numerous thick volumes. Some of them were merely bound photocopies of books attributed to “Hermes Trismegistus,” “Miriam the Jewess,” and other well-known alchemical authorities. Other volumes were ancient leather-bound tomes that looked original. Ana winced to think what someone had paid for them, only to have them stored in a dusty environment where the only climate control was in six coal-burning fireplaces.

  And then there was the computer. Ana’s hands itched for it, but it was not a kind she knew well and she doubted that on a strange machine she would be able to hide her footsteps, were anyone to wonder if unauthorized persons had been perusing its electronic innards. Reluctantly, for the time being, she left it alone.

  Beyond the bookshelves were supply cabinets with jars and canisters, all labeled. Ana had not done any chemistry since high school, but she could identify that the vials of mercury and the jars of sulfur were what they said, and the blue packages of ordinary table salt, looking peculiarly homely and out of place, still bore their factory seals. She didn’t know what antimony, saltpeter, or half a dozen other labeled substances ought to look like, but she could think of no real reason to doubt that they were what they said. A large bowl contained an incongruous heap of dried half-eggshells; a topless shoebox sagged out under the burden of twenty or so large lead fishing weights; and six small stoppered test tubes held granules of what appeared to be silver.

  She searched the back of each shelf with her light, careful to move nothing. Everything was dusty, the disused substances at the back more so, until she got to her knees to check the contents of the very bottom shelf, and noticed a small box, nearly hidden behind some stoneware mortars, that seemed remarkably dust free. Taking note of its precise location, she reached in and eased it out. It was a grocer’s package of ordinary blocks of paraffin wax.

  She ran a thumb thoughtfully over the cool, slightly greasy surface of the wax block, struck by the combination of pushed-to-the-back abandonment and its cleanliness. After a minute, she began to smile.

  A useful substance, wax. Children made strange, amoeba-shaped candles on the beach with it and handymen rubbed it onto sticking drawers. Ana’s mother used to pour a thick layer of melted wax onto the top of her jams and jellies, and Ana could recall the childhood magic of pushing down on the round wax plug and having the other side rise up to reveal the sweet preserves underneath. Wax was useful, too, in molding itself around a shape, in providing weight and bulk to a hollow core—or, conversely, in obscuring whatever it surrounded.

  She bent down and carefully put the box back into its original place. One of the commoner tricks of the alchemical charlatan, according to one of Glen’s books, was to soften a lump of dirty gray wax and wrap it around a piece of gold. When the resulting “lead” was heated in its glass alembic, the wax burned away as black smoke, miraculously revealing a puddle of pure gold.

  The word “sincere” literally translates “without wax,” Ana mused, brushing the dust from the knees of her sweats. Unadulterated. Pure. The presence of cere in this laboratory was very interesting.

  Although she would have sworn that Steven truly believed that he himself had actually created gold.

  She glanced at her watch: nearly four A.M., and time to leave. She walked a last time around the man-sized alembic in the center of the room, and suddenly knew where she’d seen the shape before: as an aura, surrounding a meditating figure at the end of the TRANSFORMATION mural in the dining hall.

  She closed the laboratory door behind her and hurried up the steps. At the top she paused to catch her breath, and then cautiously pulled the door open. The hall was still dark; her straining ears could make out no noise. She stepped out
onto the platform, closed the door, and stood rigid for a long time before she was satisfied that the hall was empty but for her. She switched on her flashlight, retrieved the key, and used it to lock the door, then replaced it just as she had found it, tugging the corners of the pillow to straighten the cover. She retreated down the platforms to the shadowy floor and out of the first set of doors into the hall’s small foyer, and was just reaching out to push open the doors to the school entranceway, when she heard voices. She snatched back her hand and turned to leap back into the hall before she caught herself: To be caught in a panicky retreat would be the worst possible thing. She lived here at Change, and if she felt like meditating at four in the morning, so what?

  Still, she couldn’t quite bring herself to walk brazenly out to the voices, and in the end it was just as well that she did not, because the two men—it was Steven, his low voice shockingly loud as he came into the entranceway—did not enter the hall. Instead, his voice faded in the direction of the school offices, saying, “I’ll go make the call; you see if you can find some milk in the kitchen.”

  There was a swishing noise as the office door shut; it was followed by the distinctive click of the main entrance. Ana pulled her own door open a fraction of an inch, fully expecting the two men to be standing there ready to pounce, and looked out onto emptiness. She counted out thirty seconds, which was about seventy heartbeats, and pulled the door open all the way. She walked briskly through the hallway and slipped out into the cold night air.

  CHAPTER 21

  From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

  A few hours later Ana staggered out of bed and drove again to Sedona to pick up her new bridge. Two different people threatened to come with her, but she managed to put them off by simply offering to do their tasks for them. The solitude within Rocinante’s thin walls combined with sleeplessness and the exhilarating feeling of Having Gotten Away With It was a heady mix; she spent most of the trip down singing old rock-and-roll songs and grinning widely at the passing cactus.