A Darker Place

by Laurie R. King

  “Sorry,” Ana said. Her mouth felt numb, her voice not her own. She tried a return smile, apparently with success. “I was miles away. That would be good of you, thanks.”

  Sara picked up one of Ana’s two bags and started briskly for the stairway, chattering in an enchanting English drawl about how “disorientated” jet lag left a person, and then about the weather. Ana followed slowly, only half hearing.

  Don’t overreact, she was telling herself; this is neither Utah nor Texas. You’ve spent weeks in the Arizona community and seen no signs of problems, and then you come here and take the rude gesture of one anti-authoritarian driver and the speech of a self-important member—not even the group leader—put them together, and build a toppling tower.

  Calm down, woman. This is not Texas; this is not Utah. They’ll ship you back to Arizona whenever you want, and there are certainly no jugs of poison waiting in the cellar; no one is about to run out with an automatic pistol to stop you from driving away. Just think of it as a brief enlistment with the English army.

  The surface of her mind began to clear, so that by the top of the second flight of stairs she was paying attention to what her guide was saying about the recent spate of long, dry summers and the mixed feelings the entire country had about warmth in May.

  Ana responded with a comment about how amazing the eyes found the rich green foliage that they had come through compared with the sparse, dry landscape, even in the rush of spring that they had driven through on their way to the airport in Phoenix. They talked while Sara marched her up to a small, cold, north-facing room with ill-fitting curtains and a lumpy mattress, showed her the bath, toilet, and linen room, and helped her make up the bed (Sara’s half had tight, sharp corners) before leading her back down the stairs.

  All the while, though, grinding down in the deeper reaches of her mind and repeating over and over was the thought: I should never have let Dulcie and Jason on that plane. Never.

  CHAPTER 25

  Jonestown began as an attempt to build a paradise in the wilderness, a garden of Eden carved out of the Guyana jungle, populated by multiracial refugees from the oppressive policies of the American system. A thousand people followed the Reverend Jim Jones into the wilderness; within a year, more than nine hundred of them would swallow poisoned fruit drink and lie dead beneath the tropical sun.

  However, one cannot explain away the suicide of Jonestown as merely a product of mass delusion and hysteria with a charismatic madman deliberately manipulating his gullible followers. This was a community of well meaning, deeply committed believers who saw the enemy at their gates, about to break in and break them apart. These were men and women willing to take their own lives, and the lives of their beloved children, rather than submit to the contamination of the outside world. When Jewish rebels gave themselves and their children to the knife in first century Masada, theirs became a cry of resolute freedom through the millenia; the followers of Jim Jones will go down as poor deluded losers.

  One obvious difference between Jonestown and Masada lies in the degree of actual threat involved. The Romans would indeed have executed some of the rebels and sent the others into brutal slavery; Congressman Ryan and his team were merely investigating, the first bureaucratic trickle in what would have become a deluge. To the minds of the two communities, though, the threat was identical, primarily because the residents of Jonestown were as isolated and pressured as the community over the Dead Sea was 1900 years before.

  Isolation and pressure are the two deadliest enemies of any volatile situation. Heat from outside, added to the heat generated from within, and kept under tight pressure by isolation (be it voluntary or enforced) is a sure recipe for disaster. Isolation by itself is a useful tool, if kept sufficiently low key; pressure too can be valuable, if a clear and acceptable (to the community) outlet is provided. Put the two forces together, though, and you have a pressure cooker waiting to explode.

  Excerpt from Religious Communities and the Law: An Alternative

  Approach, by Dr. Anne Waverly (a publication of the Federal

  Bureau of Investigation)

  But then the next morning Ana woke to the joyful noise of a thousand birds singing their hearts out, and the sound, shouting forth the magnificence of life and hope and normality, blended with the golden light pouring in and brightening the spare furnishings and the stained ceiling, and her heart was glad. Yesterday had been a dark dream plagued by a neurotic fantasy, created by pressures and anxieties and fed by jet lag, her personal history, and an accumulation of sleepless nights. Today she would start afresh, and give herself a chance to see this branch of Change with clear eyes.

  Her wristwatch had suffered from the journey, though. Either that or she had made a mistake in setting it to local time, because although it told her that it was not yet five o’clock, her eyes and the birds outside insisted that the morning was well and truly broken.

  She dressed and went out into the hallway, where she stopped, puzzled by the complete lack of activity. There were no plumbing noises, no voices from downstairs; surely someone would have mentioned it if Change rose with the dawn? However, when she got to the kitchen and found the only indicator of life to be the fragrance coming from the coffeepot, she took it as a sign that only early risers were about. Actually, if she thought it over, it was a twice-good sign: Here, it seemed, she would be allowed to start the day on something more powerful than a tea bag.

  She looked around for a kitchen clock, and was chagrined to discover that no, her watch was not wrong. She had just forgotten how far north England was, how incredibly early it grew light there in the summer.

  Well, she was not about to go back to bed, not with fresh coffee at hand and the glories of an English morning outside the door. She tried various cupboard doors until she found a mug, poured herself some coffee and added a splash of rich yellow milk from a glass jug in the refrigerator, and opened the back door.

  And nearly whirled around and slammed it behind her, until her mind registered that the pack of baying dogs was not actually going for her.

  “Quiet!” she ordered, and then, “Shut up!” A simple “No!” seemed to do more than either of the first commands, so she repeated it sternly until the noise died down to a few growls and whiffles and her heart rate returned to normal. When most of the dogs were quiet, she lowered herself onto the top step and extended her hand for their examination. One or two seemed happy enough to adopt her as their own, two or three stayed well back, eyeing her suspiciously and grumbling to themselves, and the other half-dozen, a motley collection that included a slim boxer very like Livy, sniffed her hand, accepted a pat, and then ignored her.

  She would have to wait awhile before she tried to walk through their midst, though, so she settled down with the cup of coffee (which miraculously had not entirely sloshed over the steps when she was first confronted by the pack) and a pair of hairy heads immobilizing her feet, and breathed in the day.

  Ana’s previous trips to England had concentrated on the cities and on tourist sites. The closest she had come to a farmyard were one visit to a farm museum near Oxford and a night in a rural bed-and-breakfast when she and Aaron had been caught by night on a dark road somewhere between Stonehenge and Bath.

  There was no doubt that this was a working farm; the very smell in the air told Ana that, even without the sounds of rooster and cow and the memory of three large tractors parked in the yard the afternoon before. The weeds might be thick but the fences were maintained, and although there had appeared to be a leak somewhere in the roof over Ana’s bedroom, she would have bet that the barn was sound.

  When the cup was empty, Ana figured that she had sat there long enough to become familiar to the dogs. She put her cup down onto the side of the step where no passerby would kick it, and got casually to her feet, standing for a minute while the dogs around the edges gave a few disapproving whuffs. Her two closest admirers waved their tails expectantly; the others waited to see what she had in mind. She addressed he
r companions.

  “Want to go for a walk, guys?” she asked in a cheerful voice. “Yes? Okay, come on.”

  The disapproving ones started barking, which set off the middle-of-the-road members, but Ana merely slapped her left thigh encouragingly and strode off.

  She ended up with five dogs in all, sailing back and forth across the gravel in front of her, but before she reached the end of the yard, she heard a woman’s voice behind her, calling for her to stop and wait. She stopped and turned around to wait for the flustered young woman, who was securing a floppy straw hat onto her head with one hand as she ran and holding an identical hat in her other hand.

  Hats—oh yes; Bennett had said that hats were to be worn out-of-doors to foil the intrusions of the telephoto lenses, spy planes, and satellites.

  The young woman stopped in front of her, panting from the run, and held out the extra hat. “You need to wear this,” she said. “You mustn’t forget again, or Marc will get angry.”

  Ana looked at the hat. It was a ridiculous piece of headgear with a low, round crown guaranteed to shift around on the head surrounded by ten inches of soft, grubby, sweat-stained brim. The ribbons necessary to hold it in place were colorless with age and had been tied together in a couple of places. She did not want to have this disgusting object between her and the magnificent blue sky.

  Ana, she told herself, in Israel you cover yourself neck to wrist to ankle even in August; in New York you cripple yourself with heels. Here you will wear a hat.

  She clapped it on her head and thanked the young woman with as much good grace as she could muster, and without another word turned her back and continued on up the lane.

  The wide brim and musty smell of the object on her head dimmed the morning somewhat, and when she reached the point where the road went into the woods, tempted by the thought that in there she might remove it, she paused. The vision of a man wearing camouflage gear was vivid. Perhaps until she knew the ground rules she’d better stick to the open fields, she decided, and turned left onto a muddy track that ran between a fenced field with half a dozen cows in it on one side and on the other a wild thicket of nettles, blackberries, and bushes where the woods began. It was not as nice as the lane, and she had to take care not to put her foot into a cowpat or lose her hat to a branch, but the dogs were pleased and her spirit was content.

  It was a nice long circuit with many pleasing ins and outs and dead ends, but it was also a puzzling one. On her left for the entire time lay civilization in the form of cows and sheep, two massive draft horses and a well-populated duck pond, fenced pastures and vegetable garden. Extending out from the house was a twelve-foot-high brick wall lined with espaliered fruit trees, with a gap in the bricks revealing a glimpse of an acre or more of enclosed garden with a gleaming greenhouse, more trees espaliered against the wall, and rows of ruthlessly neat planted beds.

  It was a beautiful farm, ageless in structure and vigorously modern in intent; it left Ana with a clear idea of just where all that hard work Bennett had referred to went.

  The whole time, however, with the civil arts of the gardener displayed on her left, the right-hand prospect was nothing but a wall of overgrown shrubs, tangled vines, and impenetrable thicket. It was beautiful, too, in its wild way—magnificent, even, such as the huge rhododendron that had grown up and then toppled, rooting and resprouting where it lay until it formed a single plant nearly fifty feet long. Its clusters of red blossoms were fading now, but a few weeks earlier they must have been spectacular in spite of the heavy tangle of bramble that was clambering over the great bush. The rhododendron gave way to a wall of privet that cried out for the attentions of half a dozen strong men with chain saws; farther on, a tree three feet across at its base had fallen onto the lane and had its upper half cleared away while the rest of it was left to rot on the ground, after which a gate, so overgrown as to be unopenable with any tool short of a bulldozer, showed where a narrow lane had once joined with the home farm. So it continued, all the way around: tidy industry and the clean fragrance of grass on the left, a high wall of wild vegetation and the smell of rotting things on the right, hacked back as if a line had been drawn, untouched beyond that boundary. Order versus chaos—the early American colonies must have felt a little like this, settlements carved out of the wilderness. Or an enchanted castle, insulated from time.

  From down at the bottom of the farm, the house was softened by the outlying walls and structures, its lower half hidden by trees. The top of it rose up, though, and Ana saw for the first time that it was not just a box, as it had appeared from the back door. The central portion of the main block stepped up, two or three stories higher than the sides, and that section was topped by the tangle of chimneys. It looked a bit like a flattened pear, an overripe Cornice dropped from a height onto its bottom, and would, she reflected, have been much improved had someone alleviated the unimaginative symmetry by propping a giant leaf up against the central stem of chimneys. She grinned at the whimsical image, and went on.

  Back at the walled garden near the house, Ana turned to survey the gently sloping terrain down to the jungle, and was hit by its unlikely but striking similarity to another would-be paradise, the remnants of which she had once visited, a hortus conclusus whose inhabitants had tried to keep the outside world at bay while an ideal society was being constructed within the boundaries. Sealed in, like this place, by the hermetic walls of the jungle, with stringently limited outside contact and a strong sense of oppression, the pressure had built until it could be held no longer. People called it Jonestown—and why the hell, thought Ana, was she dwelling on that tropical, blood-soaked patch of insanity, here on this glorious morning on this piece of God’s green earth less than three hours from the edges of London? Macabre thoughts had no business intruding, and paranoia was clearly a two-way street. Yes, it was a good thing that she would never do this for Glen again; academia was an outpost of rationality by comparison.

  Still, as she looked back at the abrupt wall of vegetation she found that she was again wishing for the last two days back, so she could walk straight through the Phoenix airport and put Dulcie and Jason in a taxi and drive them straight to Glen or Agent Rayne Steinberg or even the FBI boy with the protruding ears in Prescott. Looking at the forest walls pressing in on her, she could not shake off the fanciful image of bringing Jason and Dulcie to be hermetically sealed into these green walls, awaiting Transformation. She shivered and pushed the idea away violently. Enough! Time for breakfast and human contact: The mind of the individual, like that of the community, needs contact with others to keep it balanced.

  Life was stirring in the house when she returned. She removed her mucky boots at the kitchen door, carrying them inside for fear one of the dogs might take it into his head that they were chew toys, and propped them and the distasteful hat in a corner. She found a washroom and cleaned her hands, then presented herself in the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” she said to the room at large. “Anything I can do to help?”

  There was.

  Some years before, Anne Waverly had come to know a visiting pair of eminent anthropologists who were spending half a year at her university. Most of the team’s publications were in the husband’s name, but he freely admitted that a lot of the research, and indeed all of the research done into the women’s side of the society being studied, was conducted by his wife, a frail, white-haired woman whom Anne had come to think of as the Miss Marple of the anthropology set.

  The woman’s approach was to present herself to their new society—be it in Africa, highland New Guinea, or northern Canada—as precisely what she was: a grandmother. Out would come the knitting and the photographs, the stories and the remedies for arthritis, and with the babies crawling around their feet and the pots bubbling in the background, the women would freely submit to having their brains picked and their communal souls bared. She was a formidable weapon in the anthropological array, and. Anne imitated her methods whenever she could. A community’s mind a
nd pocket may be in the meditation hall and the office, but its heart and soul are found on the cooking hearth, and although Ana might not have snapshots of the grandchildren or a woolly sweater on her needles, she had found that a person could ask anything if she did it with her arms immersed in greasy soapsuds.

  Until the schooling arrangements for the Arizona newcomers were straightened out, which according to Dov would take a couple of days, Ana had no responsibilities, so she washed pans and scrubbed shelves and peeled vegetables. And she talked blithely, and she listened to their complaints and their squabbles, and she wondered at the level of antagonism in the kitchen and at the plethora of convoluted difficulties they were having with health inspectors and school inspectors and Social Services inspectors and banks. She had thought the United States was drowning in bureaucracy, but it would appear that America had nothing on the United Kingdom. By the time the lunch dishes were cleaned up, she had a clear sense of the mental state of this community—which she found filled with sharp little tensions while maintaining a powerful sense of self-confidence in the face of the world’s vexations—and had gained a basic idea of how the community functioned.

  She was struck, first of all, by the extent to which Marc Bennett had been right: There were profound differences between Steven’s compound and this one—differences that went far deeper than the presence or lack of a coffeepot. The English group was actually much smaller, though it was longer established, and because it did not import children for a school, the population was older. Also, although Steven had referred to Jonas as the leader here, the unseen figure seemed to occupy more a position of aloof but ultimate authority than being involved in the day-to-day operations of the place, which were firmly in the hands of Marc Bennett.