She scooted the chair back a few inches and began to open the desk drawers, looking for keys. The locks on the three doors outside Jonas's study were all new enough to retain their brass shine, and she thought it highly unlikely that an amateur like her could pick all three without being discovered. She didn't even know if English locks differed from the American brands she had learned on. She had a brief image of herself reduced to battering down the doors with a fire ax, and shook her head. Another thing Glen had left her unprepared for.
Instead, she searched for a key. Possibly a set of keys, but since all three locks looked identical from the outside, there was a good chance Jonas would have asked for one key rather than fumbling to choose the right one.
In the bottom left drawer she found a wooden cigar box containing a rich cache of keys; unfortunately, most of them were of the long-shanked skeleton type gone black with age, obviously original to the building. There were half a dozen newer keys, but when she went to look at the doors, none of the keys matched the brand names on the locks. She pulled out two or three likely candidates, but none of them fit.
They were all labeled, cardboard circles with metal edges tied on with loops of string, but the words written down bore no resemblance to locations. The one in her hand, for example, had a Greek phrase written in a neat hand that she thought might be that of Jonas Seraph. She puzzled over it for a moment and decided it said, "All men have one entrance into life," which she thought was from The Apocrypha—given the language, probably from The Wisdom of Solomon. Then she realized what the key was: to the front door. A similar key bore simply the word "anus", which seemed peculiar until she came up with its euphemism of "back passage": This would be the key to the outside door near the kitchen. Jonas had his own sense of humor, inconvenient and juvenile, but clever.
She put the keys back and closed the desk drawer on them. It was, of course, all too possible that he had only one key and he kept it with him at all times, in which case this entire enterprise was about to trickle off into farce. Still, she was not finished yet. She pushed herself away from the desk, returning the chair to its original position, and turned to the shelves.
A painstaking half-circuit of the room, beginning with the door and working her way along the left side of the room, left her with filthy hands, a heightened respect for the man's depth of scholarship, and no key. She sorted through the wild assortment of objects covering the windows—the only windows in this level of the house, she had discovered—but there was no key, even though it would have been his style. She did find, hanging among the display of dry bones that covered the third window, a silver necklace, a worn lump of silver similar to the golden shape Steven wore, only slightly elongated and curved inward at the ends. It looked, actually, a bit like a crescent moon, and she thumbed it, wondering briefly whose Work this had been, before her growing apprehension and sense of time running out drove her back to the room's entrance to start the sweep of the other half of the room.
Three shelves down from the top, at fingertip reach for a man of six feet four but needing a ladder for her, a title jumped out at her: Mary Baker Eddy's book that formed the basis for Christian Science interpretation of the Bible. Its name was The Key to the Scriptures, and Anne knew instantly why it was there among a group of geology textbooks. She carried over the library ladder, pulled down the book, and opened it at the red ribbon: a key.
She slid the book back, put the ladder away, and took the beribboned key into the hallway. The house had fallen silent above her, which meant only that it was not yet time to begin the preparations for lunch. No time to waste.
She began with the left-hand door. The key turned, but the door did not open. Her heart sank, then speeded up. If her key did not open it, that was not because it did not work; there must be another lock, turned from the inside. Someone was behind this door. Very gently, she rotated the key the other way to remove it, and when she withdrew her hand from the knob, it turned, and the door came open. She stumbled backward, and then felt like smacking herself on the forehead: the door had been unlocked to begin with.
Looking inside, she could see why. This was Jonas's private rest room, and the only reason he might lock it at all was the extensive collection of oversized books on erotica that took up most of one wall. She dosed the door and tried the other two knobs. Both of those were locked.
The right-hand door proved to be a closet, with nothing more exciting than an elderly computer sitting among the reams of paper and printer cartridges. She locked the door without even entering the small room, and turned to the middle door, where she found a web of scratches around the keyhole. The key turned, the door opened, she put her head inside, and for the first time she heard noises—a slow, rhythmical thump punctuated by the indistinguishable rumble of male voices. She contemplated the sounds for a minute, and then she withdrew her head, went back to the study, and replaced the key inside Mary Baker Eddy. This time when she came out she walked directly over to the middle door and went through, closing it behind her but not turning the latch. I found it open, Jonas, she would say innocently. You must have forgotten to lock it, she would add with a blink of her big blue eyes.
She was in a dim subterranean passage, stone walls again to support the brick structure above. It was long and straight, its only features the doors that faced each other every ten feet or so, most of which were heavy, old, and locked. Two of them were massive, strapped with bolted iron and set with elaborate black locks that looked considerably more ancient than the building over her head. Arnold Schwarzenegger might be able to pick those mechanisms, but Anne hoped she wouldn't be called on to try.
The rhythmic noise increased as she walked down the passageway. A stone barrier blocked the end, but when she reached it she found not another pair of doors, but a T-junction, with the passageway splitting at right angles in either direction. She had chosen the left both in the study and then with the three doors, neither of which had been very helpful, but she decided to give the direction one more chance, and walked softly down the narrow corridor to the left toward the sound of machinery, the steady hiss of air, and the ever-clearer voices.
The stone walls went for thirty feet and then took another ninety-degree turn, this time to the right. The sound of her rubber-soled shoes on the grit was lost now, and she could hear, unmistakably, the deep voice of Jonas Seraph in an uninterrupted monologue. The walls turned another corner to the right, but she seemed to be nearly on top of the sounds, so instead of stepping out into whatever space lay beyond, she knelt, putting herself below eye level, and peered around the wall.
Opposite her, perhaps fifty feet away, a stone archway opened up—the right-hand half of the split corridor, which together with the one she had followed formed a squared Y around the central room. The wall between her and the archway had two doors, both shut. She eased herself forward, more and more of the room coming into view, until she saw a man seated on a high stool, his back to her. It looked like Marc Bennett; he seemed to be just sitting and gazing at something on a long, heavy, beat-up workbench. If she had chosen the right-hand passage, he would now be looking straight at her.
Keeping her body well back from the room's line of sight, she edged her gaze farther out into the room. Next she saw Jonas himself, also on a stool and directly facing her, although what she had thought to be monologue was actually him reading aloud from a heavy volume in archaic English on the Peacock stage of the alchemical process, and he did not look up. His voice rose and fell, infusing the nonsense with considerably more drama and meaning than it possessed.
The hiss and thump continued without faltering, and Anne braced herself for what else the room would contain. She was soon looking clear to the end wall, but what she saw was not a metallic pear-shaped object the height of a tall man emitting muffled cries of distress, but a small brick furnace topped by a pear-shaped glass object, the flames blown white-hot by a large bellows worked by Jason Delgado, stripped to the waist, with sweat coming off his back in r
unnels and his hair down in his face. His back muscles bunched and moved, and she could tell at a glance that every part of him burned with tiredness, yet his left arm kept a steady beat with the bellows handle. His right hand came up and dashed the sweat from his eyes, and then he shifted his position and transferred the handle over to his other hand.
She sat back against the wall with a thud. It took a moment for her mind to get around this image of Jason, it was so absolutely unexpected. She had been operating since the early hours under the assumption that for the second time in three weeks, Jason was trapped, sweltering and alone, inside a Change alembic. She had struggled and come to the decision that she had no choice but to sacrifice herself, Glen's investigation, and very possibly the lives of everyone here in the drive to free him, when all the time he was sweating not inside an alembic, but over one. She rested her head back against the stone wall and laughed silently until the tears ran down her face. Here she was, tiptoeing around like a criminal, pumped full of adrenaline, preparing to offer herself up for Jason's salvation, only to find him laboring away like an obedient young idiot over a fraudulent transmutation of matter. The sense of anticlimax would have been devastating had it not been so hopelessly funny.
Still, she reflected more soberly, Jason did not look very happy, and Dulcie would be waiting. Perhaps she could still save Jason some anguish and break up the uneven little triad in the next room. She got to her feet to go back down the corridor and upstairs to the kitchen, where like any good British housewife she prepared a tray with a pot of tea and a bowl of cookies—biscuits, she corrected herself, very nearly humming under her breath. One of the men came in while she was filling a jug with milk. He nodded at her, and ran more water into the kettle. She nodded in return and picked up the tray, walking openly through the door to the cellars. Three people saw her; no one stopped her. At the foot of the stairs she pulled open the middle door and walked in. She followed the right-hand passage this time, and without pausing she strode straight into the laboratory.
"Anyone fancy a cup of tea?" she said brightly. Marc Bennett leaped backwards at her sudden appearance, sending the stool flying until it tangled with his feet and brought him down with a crash and an oath. Jonas's reading was interrupted at the phrase "spiritual fire"; he yanked off his half-glasses and glared at her with thunder gathering on his brows. Jason broke off his work at the bellows, tried to straighten up, and instead went down on one knee with a brief cry that was instantly clamped back inside his lips. Anne took one glance at the agony on his face as the extent of his pain made itself felt, and then she swept in, set the tea tray down on the scarred, cluttered wood of the laboratory table between an astrolabe and a tall object draped in a pristine white cloth, and prepared to pour the tea.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" Bennett shouted at her, extricating himself furiously from the long-legged stool. "How the hell did you get in?"
Anne faltered, the teapot in one hand and a saucer in the other. "I thought you'd like a cup of tea," she repeated, sounding confused. "Dulcie told me that Jason was doing his "Work", so I figured you'd be down here somewhere, and the door was open, so I just came in. Why? Shouldn't I have?"
"I locked that door," Bennett declared angrily.
"Well, someone left it open."
"I locked it!" This time he looked to Jonas in appeal, but the big man just shrugged. "I did!"
"All right, so you locked it," Anne said, sounding like a mother soothing a petulant child. "But it unlocked itself and when I tried the knob it opened. Now, do you want some tea?"
"But you can't interrupt a Work!" he protested. He sounded as if he was about to stamp his feet in frustration.
"Oh, I'm sorry. You mean you don't take any breaks at all?"
"You know the rules."
She set the teapot down with a bang and turned on him indignantly. "Well, actually, no, I don't know the rules. I've been with Change for more than six weeks and the only things I know about the Work of Transformation are what I've figured out by myself. Now, shall I take this back? You may have been sitting on your stool all morning, but the boy looks nearly done in."
"Maybe she'd like to work the flames for a time, Marc," suggested a deep voice from behind her. "If she's so concerned for the boy's welfare."
"But that's not—"
"I know," Jonas said. "But nothing else about Ana is usual; why should this be? Jason, show Ana what to do."
The boy peeled himself off the wall and bent to his task with a groan between his teeth. She left the men to their refreshments and went over to the stifling heat of the furnace.
"How long have you been at it?" she asked him.
Jonas answered. "He has been at his Work for six hours, and he will manage another six, with your help."
Anne bit her lip and studied the process, which involved the slow, steady depression and lifting of the handle of a large fixed bellows, its nozzle aimed at the low brick furnace filled with charcoal. The alembic in the top was about eighteen inches high and had some unidentifiable blackened mass inside. The tube that ran through its stopper ended in a container of water, where it bubbled occasionally with escaping gasses. She waited until she had the rhythm right, and then she stepped up next to Jason and put her hand over his on the bellows handle. He kept his grip for two beats and then he pulled his sweat-soaked body away and let her work.
It was a hellish position, stooped and slow. In ten minutes her arm was numb, after twenty her shoulder burned from scalp to hip. She shifted arms, worked for another quarter hour, and then Jason took over again.
It was a long, long day. Jonas resumed his reading aloud, Marc perched on a replacement stool and climbed down from time to time to add charcoal to the fire or make minute adjustments to the alembic, the contents of which seemed to change not at all. Jason's unspoken and guilty gratitude each time she took over was all that kept her going. Even with his youth, his muscles had to be screaming every bit as much as hers. The phrase "sweat meditation" floated into her mind, though she could not remember where it came from, and she would probably have continued with the pointless, hypnotic labor until she collapsed into the fire had Jonas not suddenly stood up, slapped his book shut, and declared, "The stage of calcination is at an end, and our material must rest before the Work is resumed. You have done well."
He moved to the workbench and snatched up the white cloth, revealing a tall, elegant glass pitcher and a matching glass. He filled the glass with water from the pitcher, picked up one of the teacups and dashed its dregs to the floor, then poured water into that, too. He carried cup and glass over to where Jason stood bent over and Anne sat against the wall, and presented her with the cup and Jason with the glass. When they had drunk the water, he took back the two vessels and put them next to the pitcher, and draped the cloth back to cover them. Marc Bennett had come around the table and was whispering furiously in his ear, but Jonas waved Bennett away and came back to stand over them, saying ceremonially, "It is time to cleanse ourselves and to take food again, and to practice the discipline of silence to those who have not seen our Work. Ours is a secret Work, about which nothing is revealed. You have done well," he repeated, and that seemed to be the end of the liturgical blessing, because Bennett leapt in again and insisted, "But she hasn't been cleansed and she hasn't taken her vows. You can't just turn her loose."
Anne narrowed her eyes, not liking the sound of that, but Jonas just threw up his hands.
"All right, Marc, do what you have to. But remember, I told you, Ana isn't following the usual Work here."
Which statement did not please Marc one bit. Still, it did seem that they were to be allowed upstairs once she had taken whatever vows were required; poor Dulcie would be overjoyed.
They followed Jonas down the stone passageway to the outer door with Bennett bringing up the rear. They paused to watch him lock the door, and when he straightened and looked meaningfully at Jonas, Anne braced herself. Bennett marched over to the door of Jonas's washroom, drew it
open dramatically, and told her to go in.
"What? No, I'm not going to—"
"Ana," said Jonas. "Go."
She looked from one man to the other, but could read no threat in either of them. Bennett might be looking forward to teaching her a spiteful lesson, but it would not go beyond that, and Jonas, inscrutable as always, nonetheless seemed to be on her side. She did not want to be locked in that small space, but she had to admit that her nervousness did not justify frightening the boy by making him witness a doubtless futile struggle. She dredged up a smile. "Don't worry, Jason," she told him. "I seem to have gone about things backward, so I can't go upstairs until I've been through the starting rituals. It'll be okay. Go and find Dulcie—she'll be biting the carpets, wondering where we both are."
To save him from having to protest, she stepped forward into the small bathroom, then heard the key turn in the lock. Footsteps and voices faded as she examined the close space; with her luck lately, she thought in disgust, they'd forget all about her until Jonas needed to pee. And no doubt the ceremony was something that couldn't begin until midnight.
Still, there was plenty of water to quench her raging thirst, and a toilet, and she had gone without meals before. The water in the tap even ran nice and hot, and she set about cleansing her body, if not ritually then certainly in fact. In exploring the cupboards, she was pleased to find a bottle of aspirin with codeine, which made movement of her stiffening shoulders more bearable, and a cache of thick towels to cushion the floor.
She should have been so exhausted that she would welcome sleep, even in the cramped setting, but sleep would not come. Her muscles refused to relax, her mind leapt and skittered at every small noise, her eyes would not focus on the books of erotica even when the print was large enough to read without glasses. Her body wanted to throw itself noisily at the door, kicking and screaming, and her fingernails itched to peel away at the crack until they could insinuate themselves into the opening. Her lungs even tried to insist that they were low on air, that she was dizzy with lack of oxygen, although she knew it could not be so. More than anything, she longed to pace like a caged beast, but she could take no more than two steps before being trapped by the shelves or the toilet. It was all a part of their absurd alchemical ritual, she told herself again and again. Once she had expressed the proper awe and submitted herself to their masculine authority, they would be satisfied and let her go.
The Birth of a new moon Page 39