A Darker Place

by Laurie R. King

  And birds, even before full dawn. Distant and tentative at first, then becoming near as others showed themselves and joined in. A far-off rooster contributed its crow, and Ana nearly smiled at the sound.

  The chorus grew around them, until all the world rejoiced at the coming of day and the grove rang with life.

  Ana felt well and truly out of her depth here. A Marc Bennett she could get around, a Steven Change she could manipulate, but what could she possibly do with a force of nature like the Bear? She hadn’t the faintest idea what they were doing out there, what it was that he expected her to see, how she should react to him. She did know that the method she had used to impress herself on Steven—Ana the enigmatic Seeker who knew more than she realized—would be utterly useless here. Jonas had already, with a few terse sentences, out-enigmaed the Sphinx, and she had no chance to match that. It would just puzzle him.

  “Sex is a curious thing, is it not?” Jonas mused, startling her.

  After a minute, when no explanation followed, Ana asked a bit uncertainly, “I’m sorry?”

  He waved a big hand at the grotto. “Male birds sing to attract females and to proclaim their territory. In primates, the male pounds his chest and the female aligns herself with the most promising male. A woman’s great fear of violation is not only the personal threat, but the fear of the species that her choice might be taken from her. Just as a man’s great fear, castration, is not only the loss of his own strength, but having his presence in the gene pool taken from him.”

  Despite her nervousness, it was very, very tempting to respond to this with a complete non sequitur of her own regarding the Dalai Lama’s teeth or the migration of the monarch butterfly, but she resisted.

  “I don’t understand,” she said apologetically.

  “You were afraid of me. Now you’re not.”

  This was patently not true, but Ana responded carefully. “It was dark and you were a stranger. Now it’s not, and you’re not.”

  “And you have stopped to listen to the morning,” he said with no recognition of the validity of her statement.

  “It was very quiet earlier.”

  “It still is quiet back there in the deep woods.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “This estate was built in the 1830s,” he said. “The family was wiped out in the First World War and the flu epidemic that followed. The gardens deteriorated, the rides grew over, the outbuildings fell into disrepair and then into ruin.

  “Change came here twelve years ago. This grotto we’re sitting in was one of our first attempts at Transformation. It was so overgrown as to be impenetrable, a solid thicket of laurel and other shrubs grown to vast proportions. Not even bramble could grow. And like the area we were in earlier, there was no life. No birds, no animals, just the insects and funguses of decay.

  “Our first action was destruction,” he said with no small degree of relish. “Chain saws, bulldozers, and poison for the stumps—when we finished, there was devastation: a few top-heavy trees, a pile of stones where the summerhouse is, and bare, gouged earth. It resembled a First World War battleground, and had about as much life in it.

  “And now birds and squirrels live here, the pond that was little more than a mud hole supports half a dozen kinds of fish, the soil that was sour and hard now smells sweet and gives life to a myriad of growing things.”

  The bearded man, seen clearly now, had a faraway, almost dreamy look on his face. His head was tipped back so that the thick black hair tumbled back on his shoulders; the untrimmed beard covered his face nearly to his cheekbones. Daylight confirmed nighttime’s impression, that this was indeed a bear of a man. He was, oddly enough, the sort of man Ana normally found physically attractive, as big and furry as Aaron had been, or Antony Makepeace, or most of the men who ended up in her bed (other than Glen, but then, Glen was another thing altogether).

  This bear, however, was no comforting presence, and Ana had no desire whatsoever to sink her fingers into his hair. She felt a fascination, certainly, but it was like the compulsion of reversed magnets, repellent face-to-face but with a strong tug from the back. This bear was more grizzly than teddy, appealing from a safe distance but murderous when crossed. Ana had a strong urge to sit, quiet and small in her corner, although at the moment he seemed almost unaware of her presence.

  “The land and its Transformation is a paradigm for our real Work here. From destruction comes forth life. From the ashes of fire beauty is born. Personally, I wanted to set the glade to the torch, to purify it down to the ground and the stones and see what came of it, but my friends and the county council disapproved of the idea. It would have been interesting, however. There are many seeds that come to life only after the touch of fire.”

  The deep, detached voice sent a cold thread down Ana’s spine; she hugged the borrowed coat more tightly around her and closed her eyes.

  She was abruptly aware of how terribly afraid she was, although she could not have said precisely why. Fear, like pain, was an old and familiar companion. She had long ago learned to distance herself, to use the very intensity of the sensation to create a wall between it and her. Pain or fear alike could rage through her body, but her essential self was left quiet in one small corner, aware but not overtaken.

  This was different. The normal barriers refused to stay up, the spark of her being was flaring and fluttering madly in the gusts of emotion—the affection she felt for Dulcie and Jason crossed with the battering of memory and the assault of Change—and she could not find the point of balance that kept the fear-ridden Anne Waverly away from the calm essence at the center and allowed Ana Wakefield to get on with her work. There were too many pulls, too many anxieties and memories, and Anne would not go away. The situation was massively dangerous, to herself and to those around her. Ana had to be allowed to slide free; her intuitive and unthinking response to people and events was the key element that made her work for Glen possible. Why was that proving so difficult this time?

  She opened her eyes. The morning was still sweet, and Jonas Fairweather was still looking at the side of her face. She turned to him and gave him a smile that felt like a rictus.

  “Jonas,” she said, “tell me about alchemical transformation.”

  CHAPTER 28

  From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

  “Alchemical transformation,” Jonas said thoughtfully, sounding for all the world as if this were a new idea to him. “Ah yes, Steven seemed to think you had hidden talents in the field. Actually, my friend Steven knows I’ve been having some problems with my Work, and thought you might help. God knows he’s tried everything else.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I doubt it,” he said flatly.

  “So do I,” she said. “But you never know.”

  He looked at her. “No, one never knows. So what are these hidden talents of yours, Ana Wakefield? What do you know about alchemy? What can you tell me about the fading memory of success, and experiments that fail, and a power nexus that has gone dead? Hmm?”

  He was waiting. In a moment he would tire of her and walk away, and her opportunity would be lost, but for the life of her she couldn’t think of anything clever enough to catch his interest. All she could come up with was his use of the phrase “power nexus,” words Steven had used to refer to the alembic of transformation in which he had locked Jason, but that connection was too thin to build much on. In the end she was forced to fall back on the bare and aching truth.

  “If I have hidden talents, they are hidden from me, too. And I know almost nothing about alchemy. I do know a great deal about memory, and about failure. And sometimes I think I know everything there is to know about being powerless.”

  After a minute, he said, “Refreshing, if nothing else. Shall I tell you how I became interested in alchemy?” He actually waited for her to say yes before he went on.

  “It began when some friends and I decided to take a sabbatical from life and travel across Europe and the Middle East to
India. We had money, we had time, so we went slowly and saw everything there was to see along the way.

  “When we got to Bombay, we went to the caves at Elephanta, and there, before the image of Shiva’s power, we met a young Parsi woman. A guide, as it turned out, in more ways than one. We talked, we went to her home and met her family, and there I encountered the old man who was to teach me everything.

  “The Parsis are called fire worshipers, although that is a typically simplistic description of a complex tradition. I’m not going to bother telling you about them—if you’re interested, read a book. The point is, the old Parsi was a questioner. He had reached back through his own tradition to a time when the essential fire—the fire of creation and not of destruction—had been accessible to man.

  “To make a long story short, he taught me to transmute matter. I would not have believed it possible—I did not believe it possible—but I saw it, a number of times, and in the end I had to lay down my doubts. He created gold. It was costly and it took weeks of great effort and intense concentration, but it was gold, created out of a lump of lead. And if you give voice to the disbelief that is in your face I shall hit you.”

  Ana gulped and erased any reaction whatsoever from her mind.

  “I stayed with him for a year, I effected transmutation of matter six times under his supervision and three times alone, and I began the even longer and more laborious process of the Fabrication of the Tincture, about which I shall say nothing more.

  “The time came to leave Bombay. We went across Iraq and Turkey, through southern Europe to Germany, and there we stopped to see some of the cities of the great period of European alchemy. While we were in a ridiculous, childish, so-called re-creation of an alchemical laboratory, I had a vision.

  “I saw the moon clad in white, with great streams of colored sweat pouring down her face as she gave birth to a man with a thick head of golden hair, lying right there on the floor of the museum. When the man was fully birthed she held him out to me to take, and when I reached forward, my vision sank into a great bed of flame and disappeared. What do your hidden talents and powerlessness say of that, Ana Wakefield?”

  Before she could formulate any semblance of an answer, Jonas unfurled his legs and stood up, setting off down the hill in the direction of the lake. She scrambled upright and tottered off after him. On the close turf at the edge of the water, they stood looking at a family of ducklings plopping off their nest into the water.

  “Steven told me you and he have practiced firewalking,” she said.

  “It was part of the learning process, that the artifex might be aligned with the product in his alembic.”

  “Do you still do it? Firewalk?”

  “Not in some time. It was necessary only at the beginning. Why do you bring it up?”

  “Just interested. Something about what you said, the ‘bed of flame’ in your vision, I guess it was, made me think of it.”

  He fixed her with a long and peculiar look. She felt pinned down by it, caught by the intensity of his gaze, and when he opened his mouth, she braced herself for revelation. In anticlimax, all he said was, “I want my breakfast now.”

  They walked on through the restored woodlands, and although he was still difficult to read, she thought Jonas seemed as pleased as if he had found a new disciple—which, Ana reflected, he had.

  “You should thank alchemists for the distillation of alcohol. Do you drink?” He did not pause for her answer. “The scientific process, the discovery of ammonium sulfate. Algebraic formulation we owe to Jabir ibn Hayyan, nitric acid…”

  The words washed over her, but she made no effort to remember them, merely listening intently for a clue, a sign of what he needed from her. Elixirs and dragons; the characteristics of mercury; the alchemical references in Ben Jonson; the names Kalid ibn Yazid and Cheng Wei, Robert of Chester and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton, Abu Bakr and Charles II; the magnificent Latinate stages of the alchemical process, the seven or twelve or more levels of transformation from the prima materia and the nigredo of dissolutio to the white of purificatio and the red of the Stone itself; the links between the planets and the metals; the alignment necessary between the artifex and his universe and the work going on within the alembic.

  On and on he went, like a breached dam it poured out, and although the half-hour walk back to the house seemed interminable, it also seemed too short, because listen as she might—and how she listened!—she did not hear the clue she was waiting for.

  Did Jonas want an assistant? An interpreter? Twice she ventured a remark into his flood. The first time, when he was describing the role of the alchemist in society, she ventured a comment about shamanism that he seized with glee and approval. He talked about Siberia and Native American shamanism, the sacred journey and the return to the tribe with a holy object. When that merged into a description of the properties of the Philosopher’s Stone, Ana listened attentively before interjecting a remark about longevity. This time the remark was ignored, as if she had not spoken. She did notice, though, that eventually he included a lengthy review of the evidence of immortality among alchemists, which took them as far as the house.

  Once in the grand marble entrance hall, shucking off the borrowed coat, Ana said tentatively, “You said there were photographs of the gardens…?”

  Clear breakfast sounds came from the dining hall, but Jonas swept her into the first room, the one with the small television set, to display a series of before-and-after pictures. The grotto in its earlier stage looked like a jungle—she would not have been surprised to see a sloth or a monkey peeping out of the greenery. A montage showed a narrow path through a wall of branches being peeled back to become an airy ride, with two helmeted riders perched atop a pair of horses. A stretch of muck from which emerged dead trees, a few bog plants, and the handle of a shopping cart achieved its transformation as the pristine lake that she had seen at the foot of the summerhouse, complete in the photograph with two children in a rowboat and a trio of swans.

  Jonas tapped a blunt finger on the glass over a tree. “We counted seven birds’ nests in that tree the year this picture was taken. Two years before there was not one.”

  “A remarkable transformation,” she said.

  Jonas displayed a lot of white teeth surrounded by hair, which she assumed was a grin, although it looked more aggressive than appreciative.

  “Breakfast,” he said, and left the room.

  Ana followed slowly, so that she was still in the corridor when he entered the dining room. There was an immediate drop in the hubbub of conversation and clatter as his presence was acknowledged, but the pause was nothing compared to the brief moment of absolute stillness that fell over the gathering when Ana walked in on his heels. Surprise, speculation, and consternation, all over in a moment when the scores of conversations were resumed in loud and nervous tones to cover up the silence.

  Ana cursed under her breath. She should have thought of how it would look, the new woman walking in for breakfast with the guru. But surely they couldn’t think—Okay, she wasn’t completely hideous, and she was about his age, but surely—

  They could, and some of them obviously did.

  At first she was annoyed by the community’s swift assumption, irritated at the obsessive childishness of the group when it came to their leader. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in one of the stainless steel covers of the warming trays, and she had to laugh at the thought of this crop-haired, graying, peculiarly dressed woman who looked all of her forty-eight years accused of vamping the guru. It was too silly.

  It had been a long time since the three A.M. cheese-and-crackers, and she filled a plate and carried it to an unoccupied corner to reflect. Her thoughts fluttered around madly like a cage full of panicky songbirds: Jonas and Jason, Dulcie and the absent Sami, cabbage seedlings and a grotto put to the torch, a dog sent tumbling by a massive hand and a dead boy in Japan with bloody fingernails. She did not know what to do, she could not control the ima
ges in her head, and she had never felt so far from home. I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. The hell with Glen, and except for two people, I don’t care what happens to Change. I can’t do this. I can’t. Not this time.

  She heard the panic building in her thoughts, and wrenched them back from the abyss. Grabbing the handle of her fork like a weapon, she stared furiously down at her plate.

  Jesus Christ! she raged at herself. You go around ordering a fourteen-year-old kid to use his head—what about you? Think for God’s sake! It’s supposed to be what you do best, isn’t it? You study a religious vocabulary, you figure out how to speak it, and then you use its symbols to manipulate people. What the hell difference does it make if it’s an individual instead of a community? Jonas Seraph speaks a language: Learn it. What is his key? Don’t think with your guts, woman—that won’t help anyone. Stand back and look at the problem sensibly. Use the brain that God gave you and that Glen and Antony Makepeace and a score of others pounded into shape.

  First, review the facts: What had she learned that morning between the time when she had woken up with the floodlights shining through her curtain and the moment she had sat down at this scarred table?

  Well, she had learned who the mysterious Jonas was. Oh, yes.

  She’d learned that he was nuts, just to be technical, and that he liked to… She went still. She’d learned that he liked to talk. He needed to talk, and yes, he had indeed told her what he needed of her, not in a word or a phrase but in a spate of them. He did not want her to do anything; he just needed someone to listen. Not necessarily someone clever enough to work with, or knowledgeable enough to suggest alternative processes to his own Work, but a bright smile with an adequate mind behind it to talk to. Yes, a disciple. Whether by accident or by the machinations of her subconscious, she had struck precisely the right note, and she had found her role: intelligent passivity. A boy like Jason would not do as a sounding board because he tried too hard and lacked the experience; a man like Marc Bennett had his own agenda; and the woman Sami had lost patience with his genius and left.