The Birth of a new moon

by Laurie R. King

  Jonas was beginning to take shape in Ana's mind, this shadowy person defined by the reactions of those around him. Jonas was wise, Jonas was aloof, Jonas occasionally struck those who were being, in his opinion, particularly slow in understanding, although his outbursts of violence were attributed not to any lack of control, but to the teaching methods of a superior being. Jonas did listen to Steven, and he had brought Jason and his sister and baby-sitter Ana all the way from Arizona just to look at the boy, but Jonas could not be bothered to explain his pronouncements to Jason, and had grown quickly impatient with the shy overtures of a fourteen-year-old boy. Ana speculated for a moment about Jason's reactions if Jonas had tried to backhand him into a state of satori, and decided that Jason would almost certainly not have struck back. He was already as much in awe of Jonas as everyone else.

  Ana had met any number of people who were as wrapped up in themselves as Jonas seemed to be. Some of them had been profoundly retarded; others were off-the-scale geniuses. Sociopaths were this way, and the severely neurotic, and madmen of various flavors, for that matter—as well as think-tank employees, high-ranking business executives, high-flying academics, half the archbishops she had met, and even, it is true, one or two genuinely holy people. The utter self-absorption of these individuals would have seemed brutal if there had been any awareness in it; as it was, it often seemed only otherwordly. Into which category, she wondered, did Jonas Seraph fit?

  The big Victorian house was quiet now, the smaller children abed and group meditation absorbing the adults. Perhaps she might find some hot water in the pipes to soak away the aches.

  Ana pried herself up from the soft chair, laid the story about the church mice on the seat, and took herself to bed.

  At about the same time that Ana was brushing her teeth and splashing water on her bleary eyes, the diary pages she had mailed at the Phoenix airport landed on Glen's desk. Glen happened to be there, having a tense phone conversation with his fiancee about a dinner party. When he saw the handwriting on the label, he told Lisa that he had to go, hung up on her, and ripped open the envelope.

  White faced, he skimmed the final entry and Ana's guarded note to Uncle Abner. Then, more slowly, he read both again. Gone? Ana Wakefield suddenly up and vanished into England's Change compound, out of his reach, his authority, his sight even. What the hell was she thinking of? What kind of an amateur game was she pulling? His phone rang and he reached out automatically to switch on the answering machine, then sat back in his chair and stared out the window at the uninspiring view for several minutes. When he moved again, he looked his age and more. He reached down to open a desk drawer and take out a fat file, worn and dog-eared with age. He leafed through it until he came across a photograph, which he removed and laid on his desk. From another, much newer file on the corner of his desk he took a second photo, a kindergarten portrait of "Dulcie" Delgado taken not long before she and her brother had come to Change. He laid it next to the older picture, which was a duplicate of the snapshot of Abby that Anne Waverly kept in the bottom drawer of her own desk.

  The two girls could have been sisters.

  He had seen the resemblance before, of course he had. Why, then, had he not stopped to consider the implications? Or had he, and then dismissed them? Anything that made Anne Waverly vulnerable was his responsibility, but the question was—the question that would be asked was—should he have seized on that potential weakness in his operative and immediately upgraded the level of surveillance on her? In other words, was his ass covered?

  He had nearly lost her before, eight years ago in Utah. If she had died then, or if her presence in the Utah community had not been so obviously crucial in saving as many lives as it had, Glen's job would have been quietly phased out. He might even have found himself removed from fieldwork. That success, tainted though it was, followed by the clean, almost elegant conclusion of the Cranmer investigation, had left Glen with firm ground beneath his feet, which he had laboriously reinforced during the intervening years until it was nearly as solid as rock.

  If anything happened to Anne this time, he would again feel the mud squishing up around his toes. His job was safe—even his enemies would have to admit that if one of his operatives took it into her foolish head to go waltzing out of his sphere of influence and beyond his ability to protect her, it was regrettable, but it could not be construed as his fault.

  Which did not mean that he should not move heaven and earth to drag the crazy woman back home. His job might be safe, but his position would not be, and if she failed, the voices behind his back would be poisonous. To say nothing of the reproachful voices inside his own head, telling him that he should somehow have known, and put a watch over the airports, even without the disturbing memorandum that had arrived that same afternoon.

  Since his conversation with Ana in Sedona, he had become more and more uncomfortable with the dangling thread that was Samantha Dooley. He had finally sent Rayne up to Toronto again with orders to talk her way inside the women's community where Dooley had taken shelter the previous October. To his great satisfaction, this time Rayne succeeded. His satisfaction was short-lived; Samantha Dooley was not there. She had never been there, and one of the two women who had left Change around the time she disappeared swore to Rayne that the Change founder had not come with them.

  No one had seen Samantha Dooley since the middle of October.

  Glen pulled forward the Rolodex file that had once been his father's, nipping it open at the H section. There it was: Paul Harrison, National Crime Investigation Service, with two numbers.

  He dialed the fifteen digits of the man's private number and sat back, studying the photographs of the two curly-headed girls he held in his free hand while he listened to the double ring of the English phone system.

  "Paul? Glen McCarthy here. Sorry to disturb you at home, hope you weren't in bed. Oh, just fine, and you? You heard right—her name's Lisa. Of course she's gorgeous, you know I have great taste. Oh, blonde, of course. And how're those two kids of yours? Great. Yeah, I'd like that—Lisa's never been to England. But look, Paul, I've got a kind of situation here I need some help with. Like, yesterday."

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  page 3 of 5

  Change: I knew you'd like the boy. You don't intend to send him back, then?

  Seraph: Of course not. He's wasted there. And the woman. Ana. She's…intriguing.

  Change: I thought so. Almost too good to be true.

  Seraph: You mean you suspect her?

  Change: Suspect her of—Oh, I see. No, of course not. Since when would the police have that kind of imagination? No, I meant she seemed almost too perfect. A born adept, or someone who has spent her life preparing for the work without knowing it. She's got a lot of depth to her.

  Seraph: I look forward to plumbing it. I might wish she wasn't so ugly

  Change: You think she's ugly?

  Seraph: Her hair looks like she's undergone radiation treatment.

  Change: I guess. But then you've always been a man for the hair. Remember those two women in Madras? [laughter] She has nice eyes, though, Ana does. How—[pause] How is the other thing coming along?

  Seraph: The same. Nothing.

  Change: Is there anything I can do?

  Seraph: You believe you can succeed where I fail?

  Change: Of course not, Jonas. I am only an apprentice, compared to you. We both know that. But if there's any service I can perform as an apprentice, you only have to say

  Seraph: I know, Steven. You're a friend. But it's my battle, my work, and I just need to return my mind and soul to a state of balance. Come next month, as you planned. We'll talk then.

  Change: Everything else going amoothly? The Social Serices-

  Seraph: Not on the phone, Steven. Marc seems to have it all under control.

  Change: Marc is an asshole. He's manipulating you.

  Seraph: He does Sami's job and lets me concentrate on the work. That's all that matters. You know, Steven, ther
e is one thing you can help me with. There's a book I think you took with

  Excerpt from the transcription of a telephone conversation between

  Steven Change and Jonas Fairweather (aka Jonas Seraph)

  4:46 p.m., GMT, May 21, 199-

  Even when she was Anne Waverly, Ana did not have many nightmares. The male psychiatrist assigned to her following the Utah debacle eight years before had found that absence worrying, and kept suggesting that she must be having nightmares and be repressing even the memory of having had them. She had found his attitude unbearably irritating, and soon after that had gone back to Maria, but privately she had to agree: Surely a person who had witnessed as many vile and unnerving sights as she had ought to have more broken nights?

  She eventually decided that since she had already gone through two or three real, living nightmares, her subconscious had simply thrown up its hands at manufacturing pale imitations. When she did have disturbing dreams, the actual content was usually innocuous, even when the emotional overtones were oppressive enough to send her bolt upright in her bed, all cold sweat and pounding heart.

  That night she dreamed, lying in her narrow metal bed in the women's wing of the Victorian industrialist's run-down mansion, and she came awake in a flash of absolute pounding terror.

  As usual, there had been nothing to the dream. Abby, aged three and a half or four, sat in the sandbox that Aaron had built for her in the yard of their house in Berkeley, the house on the quiet street that they had lived in for several years until they had moved to the commune in Texas when Abby was five. The child sat shirtless in the warm sunlight, dribbling sand from an old soup ladle into a series of discarded yogurt tubs and Styrofoam egg cartons. A small black cat, one of the neighborhood animals that Anne chased off because it liked to use the sandbox as its cat tray, sat on one corner of the box, watching the concentrating child. Ana, or Anne, was in turn keeping her eye on the cat, not wanting to break into Abby's serious experiment by shooing the animal away, but also not willing to have it pee in the sand. She was weeding the flower bed that ran along the side fence, tossing clumps of grass and Oxalis into an old bucket and glancing up from time to time to be sure the cat had not ventured down from its perch, when she became aware of a man standing half hidden by the shrubs in the front of the yard, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the browned, half-naked child with the sun in her gleaming tumble of coal-black hair.

  Ana came gasping awake, cold with terror and choking on the protest caught in her throat, a cry that she had to stand up and move into view and chase the man off but she couldn't because she was waking up now, and she could not reach back into her sleep to save Abby.

  She lay still until the silence of the house overcame the pounding of her heart, and then swung her legs over the edge of the lumpy mattress and put face in her hands, trying to think if she had actually seen that man. There had been just such a threatening stranger while they lived in Berkeley, a situation that involved meetings of the local parents and police. She remembered clearly how reluctant they had all been, good Berkeley radicals all, to call in the police department over a problem they felt they ought to be able to deal with themselves, and how a core group of the mothers had finally forced the issue by pointing out that it was they who were usually alone with the kids during the day, not the fathers, so the decision was theirs to make, and they wanted the police. And regular uniformed presences had done the job, at least locally and temporarily, for the man had moved on, taken his disturbing and disturbed watching self away to haunt another neighborhood.

  She had not thought of that episode in years, had not even thought of the Berkeley house for a long time. What would Maria make of the dream? she wondered, beginning to feel angry. She knew damn well that what she was feeling here in England was the same helpless rage she'd felt then, the same feeling of threat and oppression and the need to take some kind of action to protect a child. Why the hell did she need a dream to tell her all that?

  She raised her head and looked at the bright shaft of bluish light that came through the gap in the curtains. Her first night in the room she had barely noticed it, one more strangeness among all the others, but the house was surrounded by brilliant floodlights. Presumably intended to keep away intruders? Tomorrow she would borrow a clothespin or a safety pin to close the gap so it wouldn't disturb her again.

  The light cut diagonally across the foot of her bed and showed her the thin coverlet, the worn braided rug that reminded her of Dulcie's colorful efforts, left behind in Arizona for safekeeping, and her book, reading glasses, and wristwatch on the bedside table. It was not even three A.M., but Ana's body was trying to tell her that despite the position of the hands on the watch face, it was actually time to be awake and having some kind of meal. She wondered idly if Dulcie, too, was awake and begging Jason to play with her or find her something to eat.

  She lay back down for a while, staring at the bare room. She had left the window open when she went to bed, and as she lay there she became aware of a heavy, sweet smell on the night air, the rich odor of the roses that grew in the bed below, underlaid by the dank fragrance of vegetation that arose out of the surrounding jungle. Ana had never much cared for heavy floral fragrances and had been known to remove pots of blooming narcissus from a room to an external windowsill. She found herself thinking about the Arizona landscape, its spiky shapes and small, waxy leaves, with an affection that verged on longing. What she wouldn't give for a boojum tree. There had been a similarly scented rose trained on an archway leading to the herb garden in Utah, she remembered, an annoyance due to the bees it attracted and the thorns that snagged at the unwary passerby—but she was not thinking about the past now; she would think about something else. Dulcie's church mice, perhaps.

  It was no use. The whispering ghosts of memories continued to paw at her mind and her inner clock showed no signs of turning over and going back to sleep, so in the end she got up, pulled on jeans, a sweatshirt, and the pair of Chinese cloth shoes she wore as house slippers, and walked down the hall to the bathroom. She took care not to flush the toilet, a massive water closet that must have been the latest in sanitation technology when it was installed at the turn of the century but which roared its presence throughout the house when the chain loosed its eight-gallon tank of water.

  She went down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor kitchen, turned on a small light over the stove and clicked the switch on the electric kettle, then began sorting through the nearby cupboards for tea bags and edibles.

  The electric kettle had come to a boil and turned itself off before Ana had assembled mug, tea bag, and milk, its speed reminding her that Britain functioned on 220 current rather than the American 110. She poured the water over the tea bag, which instantly turned the water so black the milk did not make much headway even when she had fished out the sodden, scalding bag. Tea, too, was stronger here, it would seem.

  She found cheese and a packet of something called digestive biscuits, which looked like round graham crackers and turned out to be a good foil for the cheese. She longed to go outside to eat, away from this house of turmoil, where she could breathe the clean, unscented night air and search for the moon, but she thought of the dogs and reluctantly decided not to risk waking the house with their barking a second time.

  Instead, she took her mug and her plate and wandered through the downstairs rooms, her way lit by the shafts of cool light from outside. The dining hall was too big and empty to have much appeal for a solitary diner, so she went on, through a corridor, past a sitting room with a dark television set in the corner and on into the main entrance, a marbled expanse of pillars and stairways, shadowed and mysterious. The rustle of her clothing sent whispers crawling off into the reaches overhead. Not a place to crunch and slurp, she decided, and continued her search for a friendly corner.

  The dining room/ballroom on the one side of the house was mirrored on the other side by a room of similar size and shape. This one seemed darker despite the
bright patches from the windows, because the walls were panelled with wood. It was also the first room in the manor house that did not echo emptily, for the simple reason that the walls held tapestries and the floor had carpets. The change was soothing, but as Ana walked farther in she saw that the soft floor was practical as well: Probably originally a gallery to display the family portraits that the industrialist would have commissioned, this large room was now the Change meditation hall.

  Unlike the Arizona version, this room made no attempt at circularity. The far end of the room had a dais with a cushion for the meditation leader and a fireplace at his back—the only similarity she had seen to the Arizona compound, come to think of it. She climbed on the dais to examine it as best she could in the uneven light, but found it unexceptional, except perhaps for the locked door at the back of the raised area. She wondered if this, too, led down to an alchemical laboratory, but she had no urge to investigate. Not until she knew the community a whole lot better than she did now.

  Ana swallowed the last of her tea and patted the remaining crumbs from the plate with a wet fingertip, and when she turned to go her heart lurched at the sight of a dark figure looming in the entrance to the hall. She gave a squeak of surprise, and then said in a voice that betrayed her attempt at control, "Good evening. Or morning."

  "You are aptly named, Ana Wakefield," came the man's voice in return. It was a deep, confident, melodious voice, and as the man moved up the hall toward her, she could see that his body matched it. He was a bear of a man, at least six feet four and broad with it, but he moved with absolute silence.