A Darker Place

by Laurie R. King

  “Picture book or text?” she asked, already calling up the title on her computer.

  “Picture would be nice, if there is one.” Ana glanced at Dulcie, who was immersed in a book and not paying any attention to the conversation. “And hardback, if there’s a choice.”

  “I can have it day after tomorrow.”

  “Great,” said Ana, and told her she’d be in on Monday.

  Back in Rocinante’s passenger seat, Dulcie buried her nose in her picture books, spelling out words for Ana to translate, until the light failed and she had to put them away. She fell asleep, and did not even stir when Ana stopped the bus to retrieve a thick blanket from the back to wrap around her. Ana drove on with the window open, battering herself with fresh air to keep the weariness at bay. The child was still asleep when they bumped into the compound parking lot, but she woke and gathered up her books to carry them to Ana’s room.

  They were halfway to the central buildings when Dulcie gave a loud cry, let her precious books fall to the ground, and flew into Jason’s embrace. The boy wrapped his arms around his sister and buried his face in her hair, clinging to the child as if she were the last living thing on earth.

  CHAPTER 19

  From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

  Ana slept very well that night. At dawn she continued her habit and, putting one of the books she had bought the day before into her pocket, she climbed the red rocks and watched the sun come up over the compound.

  Steven did not turn up.

  She went down to breakfast and read the book while she carefully chewed her cut-rate cornflakes, banana, and yogurt. No one commented on it, although she was certain that at least two of the higher initiates saw it. Both of them glanced at her quickly and then moved away.

  She conducted her classes, talked about the essays the students were writing about the museum, reviewed for a test she was giving the next week, and handed back the essays they had already done. During lunch and while she was in class she left the book on her desk, its title facing up for all to see, but Steven did not come to see her, and no one seemed to take notice of the topic.

  Saturday morning came and went atop the red rocks, and Steven did not approach her, and the day passed as Saturdays did around Change, with hard physical work that included the schoolchildren and a night of relaxation, with basketball and communal music in the dining hall.

  Sunday morning came, and Steven was there at the red rocks when she arrived, watching the light creep over the compound and, she knew, waiting for her. She smiled a very quiet smile, put the book down next to her knee, crossed her legs, and surrendered herself to the moment.

  The sun rose and grew in warmth, and half an hour later, Steven was the first to stir. “Your hand is healing,” he said, his eyes still closed, his face raised to the sun. It was not a question, but a statement from an all-knowing observer of human frailty.

  “It’s much better, thank you.”

  “You have some interesting reading material, Ana Wakefield.” His eyes were still shut.

  “This?” She stretched out her legs and picked up the battered volume, which looked as if Glen had rescued it from a Dumpster before selling it to the woman in Vortex Books for fifty cents. The inside was in better condition and, to her relief, had barely been written in by the previous owner: Volume 12 of the collected works of Carl Jung, a group of related essays entitled Psychology and Alchemy,

  “Have you read any of Jung’s writings?” she asked him innocently, very sure that he had.

  He stirred, and she felt him looking at her. “Some of them.”

  “Well, I was thinking about the things you were talking about the other day before meditation, about the need for pressure in striving for personal transformation. Somewhere Jung says something along the lines of enlightenment being found at the point of greatest stress. That got me thinking about Jungian psychology in general and the goal of transformation, and I remembered that he wrote a couple of things about the symbolism of alchemy as a paradigm for change. When I was in Sedona the day before yesterday I found this book of essays in the used-book store. I’ll have to see if I can hunt down the other ones.” She stopped leafing through the book and made herself meet his eyes, making absolutely certain that she gave him only the face of Ana Wake-field, earnest Seeker Ana with no challenge or knowledge or academic superiority in it. She was in luck, because the sun was rising behind her, and whatever it was he saw in her face, it was not Professor Anne Waverly.

  “I have them. You may borrow them if you like,” he said. “You might find Volume Fourteen of interest.”

  “That’s the one with the Latin title, isn’t it? Mysterium Coniunctionis? Am I right, then, in thinking that Change—the Change movement—incorporates some of the ideas and symbolic processes of the alchemical tradition?”

  He said something under his breath.

  “I’m sorry?” she said. He rose fluidly to his feet, although he had been twisted up on the hard, cold rock in full lotus position for at least an hour.

  “It’s time we were going,” he said. She stood up, more slowly than he had, and when she looked around she saw his head disappearing down the hill. He descended the rough terrain with the ease of a cross-country runner, leaving her to pick her way among the rocks and bushes and wonder if she had heard him correctly, and if so, what he could have meant by “not just symbolic.”

  Rather to her surprise, he was waiting for her at the bottom of the hill, the very picture of a man in deep thought as he stood with head bent and hands clasped behind his back. She came to a halt, not before him as a suppliant would but next to him so he had to turn his shoulders as well as his head to shoot her his piercing glance.

  “Ana,” he pronounced, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing:”

  She couldn’t resist. “‘Learning,’” she said, and for the first time she saw Steven Change disconcerted. He blinked.

  “I’m sorry?” he demanded, impatient at her apparent non sequitur.

  “‘A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.’ That is,” she added, “supposing you were referring to Alexander Pope. It’s a common misquotation, and granted it’s a subtle distinction, but as an English teacher; I feel obligated to be pedantic.”

  God, she thought, in a minute I’ll be waving my cane and calling him a young whippersnapper. “I admit, though, that I’ve often wondered what a Pierian spring is.” Actually, she knew quite well what the words referred to: An area in Macedonia where the Muses were worshiped, it was used as a classical romanticization of learning. Steven did not seem to know this, however, and merely allowed his ruffled feathers to be smoothed by her disarming admission.

  “In either case, having an insufficient command of a path of learning can be hazardous,” he said firmly, and began to walk again. She fell in at his side.

  “A person has to begin somewhere,” she protested.

  “Very true. And in some cases, personal exploration that allows for random discoveries and spontaneous growth is for the best.” He paused, choosing his words carefully—or perhaps considering how much to tell her. “However, with the ideas that lie at the heart of Change, such unguided stumblings are more likely to result in disaster than in enlightenment. There are immense forces at work here; a misstep can be very dangerous, for you personally and for those around you.”

  Ana looked at the unrevealing side of his face, wondering uneasily if that had been a threat. She reached across with her right hand and laid it on his arm, stopping him and causing him to face her. No, there was no explicit threat in his eyes that she could see, just great seriousness. There was nothing to do but grab the ball and run, and see where it took her.

  “Are you telling me that you are doing alchemy here?” she asked bluntly, an unfeigned edge of incredulity in her voice. “Is that what you’re saying? That I mustn’t mess around in thin
gs I don’t understand because I could, in effect, blow up the laboratory?”

  He stood for a long time studying her. Finally he said, “Yes, I am.”

  “But—you’re not talking about real alchemy,” she said. “Not furnaces and alembics and actual gold.”

  “The Philosopher’s Stone,” he said reverently. He put his hand up to his collar and reached inside for the sturdy gold chain he wore and pulled at it. Up came the chain, and on the end of it a gleaming drop of pure soft gold about the size of a small marble, an uneven shape smoothed by years of wear under his clothing.

  She reached out a finger to touch it and drew back. “You mean—”

  “I created this, under the guidance of my own teacher. Three of us here have transformed lead into gold, and twelve have transmuted silver.”

  Ana sat down abruptly on a convenient boulder. She did not have to feign astonishment; the man clearly believed. If she was any judge of charlatans at all, this man, this trained scientist, truly believed that he and who knows how many others had actually changed the atomic structure of one metal into another. Nothing metaphorical about it; “not just symbolic,” indeed. A phrase from the other book she had been reading came vividly to mind: “The Middle Ages did not have a monopoly on credulity.” She did not think Steven would care much for that quote.

  Suddenly, all the oddities she had noticed about the upper echelon of Change fell into place: the calloused hands and hard muscles on men and women who rarely worked out-of-doors; Suellen’s day-long absence, to reappear exhausted, famished, and glowing with an inner light; the small burn on her arm, very like Amelia’s large and oddly placed scar, more easily explained by nearness to an open flame than to a cookstove. Alchemy was hard labor around hot flame—and glass: The tiny scars on David Carteret’s face could easily have come from an exploding glass vessel.

  She drew in a breath and blew it out between puffed cheeks. “Wow.”

  “Alchemy has been a secret doctrine for millennia, precisely because of the value of this.” Steven dropped into a squat in front of her and held out the pendant, letting it swing back and forth in the gesture of a stage hypnotist before he caught it up and tucked it back under his collar. “Alchemists who created gold were doing so as a by-product and an objectification of the internal transformation they were undergoing, but the gold was nonetheless there. That’s why they welcomed and encouraged the skepticism, even ridicule, of the outside world—it kept them safer.

  “But even without the external threat from greedy men, Ana, alchemy has always been a dangerous occupation. Explosions in laboratories were common when chemicals were heated carelessly. Impatience, Ana. Impatience is the killer of the would-be alchemist. You have it in you to do a great Work, Ana; I can feel it. But you must submit to guidance. You have to work slowly, or it will all blow up in your face.”

  There was the threat again, but still she did not feel any malice behind it. Instead, Steven gave her a smile of great sweetness and wisdom, and then rose and walked away. She watched him go, watched him shrink into the distance and finally leave the road and disappear behind a building. Then she herself rose, turned, and walked out into the desert.

  • • •

  She was gone for seven hours, long enough for people to notice her absence and approach Steven about it. She walked out into the scrub, down into the dry wash and out again before she turned up to the hills that lay a few miles off, and there she sat and thought and came to some uneasy decisions.

  Ana rarely outstepped the bounds of her role during the course of her investigations. Her success in her investigations depended on blending in, on being who she appeared to be and acting strictly as that person was expected to act, at all times, until she even thought as that person would. Her means of gathering information was more along the lines of passive receptivity than picking locks in the dead of night. Not only did illicit snooping scare her shitless, it was too dangerous to her investigation. From the very beginning, Glen positively forbade it (even as he taught her the rudimentary skills) not only because it was a threat both to her personally and to the continuation of the case, but because anything she discovered was apt to be contaminated or otherwise rendered useless as evidence: The FBI took its rules of evidence very seriously indeed.

  However, this case didn’t seem to be going like any of the others, and Ana did not know what to make of that. Anne Waverly kept intruding into her thought processes at the most inconvenient times, and this seemed to be one of them: Anne badly wanted to know what was behind Change.

  During the course of that long day in the dry hills, Ana gradually shed her reluctance. She needed to know what Steven had up his sleeve; she somehow had to shortcut the lengthy initiation process involved in any esoteric teaching; she itched to see what he was hiding; but mostly she wanted to convince herself that Steven did actually believe that he had made gold, and was not using the pendant he wore as a subtle joke along the lines of the claim he had made to levitate up the red-rock viewing platform.

  Also, she admitted to the flock of small gray birds that had settled around her, Steven’s superiority grated on her. Ana liked to win as much as the next person, and during these investigations it pleased her, tickled some deep part of her nature, to know that she held the upper hand—even if her opponent never found out about it and the only person to appreciate her was Glen. Steven was a prig and it would be a pleasure to undermine him; that alone would be justification enough.

  Most important, though, was the niggling suspicion that there was something funny about Change. She caught the thought and it made her laugh aloud, startling a small desert iguana that had settled down near her boot. Come on, Ana: What could possibly be funny about a community whose belief system was based on the manipulation of atomic structure to transmute material? Sure, medieval alchemists had believed in the possibility of creating gold from lead, but they had no means of testing, no analytical apparatus capable of distinguishing true gold from sulfurous mercury. To find seventeenth-century ideas coexisting with silicon chips, electron microscopes, and the robotic exploration of Mars said a great deal about man’s deep need to believe that he had some control over his environment. Witchcraft, magic, and alchemy. No funnier than a belief in a personal God, was it?

  Still, there was something she didn’t understand yet about Change, some group dynamic she didn’t have her finger on. Something told her that it was represented by Steven’s necklace. Something also told her that she would not find out by simply waiting to be told.

  She got to her feet and slapped the dust from her rear end. She wanted to know what was literally underlying the Change community, and tonight she would see if she could find out. Nothing dramatic, no blackened face and silken rappelling rope, just some judicious nosing about where she was not supposed to be. Ana Wakefield, after all, seemed to be the kind of pushy female who might well do that. If she was caught—well, she would tell them that she was nosy. Steven would believe that. But she would try very hard not to be caught.

  When she got back to the compound, she went straight to her room, where she drank about half a gallon of water and stood under the shower for twenty minutes, feeling like one of those desert plants that unfurl from a state of desiccated hibernation with the rains. It was stupid to go out in the desert without water. A few weeks later in the year the consequences might have been serious, but the day had been cool and overcast and she emerged from the shower only slightly sunburned and a little trembly.

  She put on clean clothes and went over to the dining hall, making straight for the serving line, where she filled a plate, put two large glasses of fruit juice onto her tray, and got to work on it. She did not look up from her dinner until half of the food was inside her, when she paused for a breath and a long drink of juice. She glanced distractedly around the room over the rim of the glass, still more interested in nourishment than in her surroundings, but she put the empty glass down slowly, and when she resumed her fork, she did so with the air of a pe
rson who is not really tasting her food.

  At first she thought that her conversation with Steven had made the rounds and her precipitous introduction to the community’s secrets had set her apart. When she caught two of the members who wore silver chains around their necks staring at her, only to have them shift their eyes and pointedly resume their conversations, she felt certain of it.

  However, the other twenty or so other early diners neither wore necklaces nor seemed to find her worthy of attention, yet they, too, seemed subdued, even troubled. She appeared to be the only person in the room with an appetite.

  She finished her food and cleared her dishes, but instead of leaving them in the trays she took them on through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. Suellen and another woman were there, already up to their elbows in soapsuds, and Amelia (who shot her the same speculative look that she had received from the two initiates outside) was spooning the last of the food into the stainless steel warming trays. Ana put her plate among the stack on Suellen’s right, and then reached for a single rubber glove to help out, pulling it onto her good hand with her teeth.

  “Man,” she said, “it’s so quiet out there, I thought I was too late for supper. Did something happen?”

  “You didn’t hear?” Suellen asked.

  “I was gone most of the day.”

  “Some of the children in England have been taken away.” Her voice was both genuinely troubled and secretly cherishing being the bearer of bad news, which Ana had counted on.

  “Taken away?” Ana exclaimed. “Do you mean they’ve been kidnapped?”

  “By the government.”

  “What?”

  “What Suellen means,” said Amelia’s disapproving English accent from behind them, “is that Social Services has got involved in a custody dispute between one of the members and her ex-husband and has temporarily removed the two children while the accusations of the father are being investigated. It has happened before.” And, her voice clearly said, it would happen again.