A Darker Place

by Laurie R. King

  And there was no doubt of his genius. He was, as she would have anticipated, extremely knowledgeable about everything to do with metallurgy, from the mining of ore to atomic structure, but he had obviously also spent a lifetime ransacking the world’s disciplines for shiny bits of knowledge. Botany, physiology, astronomy, linguistics, history—you name it, he had at least looked inside.

  Right. She could fill the position of intelligent audience. It might drive her mad, but she could do it. What else did she know about him?

  She’d discovered that he was a man who could drag a woman into the dark woods, lay hands on her, stand inches from her, even talk about sex with her and yet not rape her, not come on to her, not even sound remotely suggestive to her. Not a talent possessed by many men. And she might have thought him to be one of life’s intellectual eunuchs but for the communal reaction when she had followed him in: The Change community believed that Jonas was currently without a woman but that such a state of affairs (so to speak) was quite possible, and in this tight-knit group, she was willing to credit common belief with sure knowledge.

  Sami, then, had been here, had been his woman in some way or other, and had not been replaced.

  Yet.

  Ana stopped chewing. No, she would not—could not—seduce Jonas with her body; the very idea was as absurd as it was distasteful. But with her mind—no, go for the man’s weak spot: With her spirit, she could indeed offer to fill the gap in his life. His spiritual life.

  Think, woman.

  Alchemy: The key to his mind and method had to lie there. Alchemy was by no means just a phenomenon of medieval Europe and the Age of Reason; the very name was from the Arabic, and alchemical writings and speculations were spread in a wide swath across the Middle East, out from the China that most probably gave it birth. In China as in India, the miraculous transformation of base matter into gold was inextricably linked to the idea of energy centers rising in the body. The erotic disciplines of Tantra and Kundalini in India, the esoteric sexual branches of the tree that was Taoism in China, all were rooted, back in their beginnings, in alchemy, and all… all rested squarely on the dual nature of the human being: a union of opposites, coniunctio oppositorum; The Hermaphrodite, a name for the Stone; the symbol of king and queen joined together; the alchemist as artifex with his soror mystica, his mystic sister, at his side. As another discipline put it: Male and female made He them.

  Man and woman together explore the mysteries, yang and yin, sun and moon, gold and silver. If she could remind Jonas of this tradition, far older than that of the solitary European male working in his laboratory, if she could convince him of it, she might at the very least buy herself some time while he thought it over.

  At this point, time was gold.

  Ana put down her fork and looked around for Jonas.

  With half the community watching, Ana went after Jonas, and when she had tracked him down in the small and separate dining room used by the high-ranking initiates, its tables elegant with white linen and crystal glasses, she arranged with him for another interview at five that afternoon. She walked with dignity back through the dining hall and up to her room, planning to have a bath (it being England, “shower baths” were few and far between) and offer her labor to the garden for the day. When she reached her room, though, and shut the door behind her, she was hit by a wave of exhaustion and jet lag combined with the shuddering release of tension, and she dropped down onto the bed fully clothed, for a ten-minute nap.

  Three hours later, the sound of voices going past her door woke her. She took her oldest jeans and a T-shirt down the hallway to the bathroom, splashed herself in a tub of tepid water, and dressed. Downstairs she found lunch being set out, so she assembled a sandwich and went outside to present herself to the gardeners.

  She was given the inevitable wide-brimmed hat and a short-handled garden fork, and as she took the tool, she realized wryly that her faraway dream of spending her free hours turning soil was about to be fulfilled. She dug until blisters opened along both palms, when she was sent to tote instead: hay to the horses, firewood to the house, and finally stones in a wheelbarrow to a wall being restored.

  After four hours of hard labor, she felt as if she had been beaten about the shoulders and back. Her legs trembled, her hand and knee throbbed, her palms were aflame; every muscle in her body protested. Worst of all, she had not given a thought to her coming interview with Jonas. Whoever said that mindless labor gave one a chance to think had never hauled rock in a barrow with a crooked wheel. But the haunting memories had drawn back momentarily into their pit; for that she was willing to suffer greater discomfort than this.

  At four-thirty Ana laid down her load and went in to grab a mug of tea and another bath. There was no getting the soil from under her nails, but at least she didn’t stink when she presented herself at Jonas’s study.

  The Change leader’s room was at the bottom of a dim, dank set of stairs under the kitchen, in a part of the house that the Victorian family upstairs had probably never set foot in. She stood on the uneven stones that formed the floor and looked longingly at the three firmly closed doors in front of her. All three had new, sturdy-looking locks. Although she would have given much to see behind them, she had no choice but to turn and walk beneath the stairway to the open door of Jonas’s study.

  “Lair” might have been a more accurate description. It was a big room, twenty-five feet across and nearly twenty high, and from the looks of it had been the original kitchen, back when servants were expected to run upstairs with heavy platters of hot food rather than taint the upper air with the sounds and smells of cooking. The high windows, excavated below ground level, may once have lit the space adequately: Now they were so covered with uneven bead curtains as to be indistinguishable from the walls, aside from a certain glow behind the beads.

  Or not beads—objects, thousands of objects hung up against the light on strings and ribbons and fishing line. With themes—one window held nothing but drinking vessels, from commemorative teacups to the small mended pottery amphoras of an archaeological dig, while the next one had figurines from all over the world, all less than two inches in height. The third one seemed to be sticks and rocks until Ana looked more closely and saw that they were bones: chicken bones, bird skulls, the articulated foot of some small mammal, and near the bottom an object that looked disconcertingly like the skull of an infant human being. She hoped it was a monkey.

  Jonas was reading a newspaper, apparently a current one, which seemed to her somehow extraordinary, particularly as he wore steel-framed half-glasses to do so. He had looked up as she came in, and his eyebrows rose as if he had no idea who she was or what she wanted. She tore her gaze from the strange window coverings and offered him a tentative smile.

  “Ana Wakefield. You told me to come at five?”

  His face did not change as he said, “I hope you are wearing more adequate footwear than you did this morning.”

  She nodded, and he pulled off his glasses and tossed them and the paper on top of the huge wooden desk that was piled high with papers, journals, used coffee cups, and more books than Ana could have gotten through in a month.

  “Wait here,” he told her. “I need to urinate.”

  It was indeed a lair, or a den, or one of the illustrations of medieval alchemical laboratories come to life, lacking only the actual tools of the trade. She would not have been surprised to see Rackham’s awestruck alchemical gnome lurking in one corner. Tables were heaped high with books and papers, plates of half-eaten food and cups bristling with pens and pencils. The ballpoint pens seemed anachronistic, to say nothing of the elaborate computer array with scanner, phone line, and an industrial-strength-sized external hard drive: Quills and an abacus would have been more appropriate. High, dark bookshelves held literally thousands of books, many several inches thick and hand-bound in ancient leather, but others considerably more recent, and she had a true shock when she saw a familiar spine tucked between two books from the end of the
nineteenth century: Jonas had a copy of Anne Waverly’s Cults Among Us on his shelf, and she was very glad that she had refused to have an author photo placed on the inner flap. It was disconcerting, as if she had caught sight of Glen peeping through the windows: Comforting, but she could only hope no one else noticed.

  Jonas came back and found her standing in the same spot as when he had left. He ran his gaze over the room as if to make sure he had not forgotten anything, then grunted, and walked out. She took the grunt as an invitation, or a command, but as she turned to follow, she glanced over at the headlines of the paper he had been reading, and caught the words AMERICAN CULT. She swore under her breath; all she needed was another notch of pressure on Change. If the media climbed onto the current load of problems, it would not make her time there any easier.

  “Why do they so love the word ‘cult’?” Jonas was saying irritably. “They use it as a term of opprobrium, certainly of derision. Did you know that ‘cult’ is from the Latin cultus, from the verb incolere, meaning to inhabit or care for a place? And that it is related to the Greek kyklos wheel, which in turn is linked to the Sanskrit chakra? You do know what a chakra is?” he demanded, stopping on the stairs to peer down at her.

  This time he seemed to want his question answered, so she obediently said, “It means wheel, too, doesn’t it? Or the energy centers of the body that are depicted as wheels.”

  He grunted and continued. “Cultivate, culture, they’re all the same, though I would say in this country we’re more a cultigen than a cultivar. You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Cults,” she said promptly.

  “I suppose,” he said, and led her out-of-doors.

  They walked again, out into the jungle that had once been the formal gardens of an estate. Twice they went through green walls that she would have considered impenetrable, but Jonas knew just where to push his way, and they continued.

  And he talked. She was well on her way to establishing herself as his soror mystica, she thought, but she had begun to feel a deep sympathy for Sami Dooley. When she got caught on a branch as he was telling her about the life of Arnold of Villanova, he merely reached back and hauled her bodily through the gouging, scraping branches. She tried to raise her spirits by the thought of what a fascinating study she would someday write of this whole episode, but the humor was halfhearted and the pain too sharp, and more immediate was the knowledge that she was being led off into the lonely woods by a man who made her feel as if she were carrying a rattlesnake in her coat pocket.

  Focus! she ordered fiercely. Think, you stupid woman. Listen to what he’s saying, this modern alchemist who believes, with all the power of his stunted emotions and considerable intellect, that the very nature of matter can be transformed by the application of a precise set of changes, forces, circumstances. Listen to his words, pick out his key images and the central ideas that drive him; use them to nudge him toward where you want him to be. Yes, he’s a goddamn genius, but even the brightest minds have their blind spots, and you are about to become his. You can do this. You have to.

  The path had cleared somewhat, and Ana walked just behind Jonas, her hands clasped behind her back, her head bent to catch his words, the perfect disciple. He was talking again about the stages of transformation that the prima materia goes through on its path to perfection into gold. She waited until he came to a resting point, and then she asked him a question.

  “I do see that is like the rising of the Kundalini through the chakras. Don’t the Chinese call them chis?”

  That set him off on the topic of nerve centers and the rising of energies, sexual and otherwise, and the Indian, Chinese ties throughout history. Ana walked quietly, listening to his remarkably explicit descriptions of the frankly erotic discipline of Tantra, and then asked him, struggling to keep the question matter-of-fact, “To what extent do you think the alchemists saw the Kundalini as a metaphorical idea rather than actual, physical Tantra yoga?”

  She might have been asking about rocks for all the overtones his answer held. “The alchemist always speaks on several levels at once: literal, then metaphorical, and then on the plane where the literal and the metaphorical are one. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” He then went on to speak about the role of the soror mystica, the mystical sister, during the course of which he left Ana in no doubt about the distinctly non-sisterly actions that Sami had performed for him, and in great doubt about why she had possibly thought of him as an asexual being. He seemed unconscious that she might be feeling any discomfort, but she was distinctly relieved when he finally abandoned the topic of the metaphysical energies aroused by various sexual positions and wandered on to discuss the nature of the “pure dew” that some medieval recipes specified was to be gathered for the process—was it actual on-the-leaves morning dew or, rather, a virgin’s urine?—and then shifted into the esoteric objects used in various alchemical recipes. That kept him busy for a while, but eventually he mentioned, for the third time since they had met, the problem he was having with the current Work, and Ana knew she had to seize her opportunity. She summoned every scrap of sincerity and innocence that she could find and put it into her voice.

  “Um, Jonas? When you talk about the need of the alchemist to be in balance, both with the external universe and with the microcosm within the alembic, and also about the duality of the Stone, I just wondered if you’d ever considered pairing up for your Work with one of the high-ranking women initiates in Change, to give you the balance of duality? It’s just a thought.”

  There it was, presented to him by the tentative, always helpful, never threatening Ana Wakefield. With any luck, he would soon believe that he had thought of the solution himself.

  Just then, however, he had something else on his mind. They had been walking in a rough circle and were now headed back toward the house and into the sunset, when the thick growth abruptly stopped, as it had that morning at the grotto. This open space, though, seemed somehow less restored than it did reserved, as if nothing but green grass had ever grown in a wide rectangular space around the low, crumbling walls of what had once been a sizable building. It was quiet there, but it was not the utter silence of lifelessness and strangulation; what she heard was the hush of content and respect.

  “Abby,” said Jonas, to Ana’s confusion and shock. When she did not answer, he turned and saw her strange expression, and frowned.

  “The abbey,” he repeated. “This was a Benedictine abbey until the Dissolution of Henry the Eighth. This particular part of the estate is a historical preserve, or else I might have been tempted to do more restoration work. I’m glad I didn’t: It took me years to discover that this is the energy center of the land around, and a line drawn from here to the house precisely bisects, at right angles, the line between Stonehenge and Glastonbury. Can’t you feel the energy?”

  Ana nodded obediently, a bit too distracted to feel the subtle ley lines under her feet. It was, however, a very lovely spot, and she felt that she would like to return there under different circumstances.

  She walked forward into the cruciform ruins, entering at what had been the front doors of the building. In some places the stones of the nave walls were missing completely, and in others the grass and wildflowers grew up over the tumbled stonework to waist height. The remnants of the walls were taller at the end of the building where the altar had been; they rose past Ana’s head, and the base of one of the windows could be seen, its decorative carving long weathered into soft shapelessness. Small ferns and wallflowers had rooted themselves among the cracks.

  Once away from the walls, the entire floor of the abbey was a smooth carpet of green turf set with tiny white wildflowers, but for one massive rectangular stone which, judging by its location, marked where the altar had stood. Someone had taken care to keep its surface clear of grass, trimming the edges back—in fact, the entire stone looked renewed, as if it had been lifted and relaid to keep it from sinking into the earth and disappearing
entirely. It did not even have much moss on it. Jonas may have decided that this point marked his ley line, which would be an ironic variation on the ancient Christian tradition of building a church on the holy ground of its predecessors: The New Age reclaims a Christian site for its primal energy potentials. Ana stood with her toes nearly touching the revealed stone, looking up, trying to conjure up the ghostly outlines of the church that had once formed the center of this lively monastic community.

  When Jonas’s hands came down on her shoulders she nearly leapt out of her skin. He heard her gasp and slid his grip down to her upper arms. He squeezed once, and then moved around to the other side of the altar stone, taking care not to step on the stone itself. She lifted her eyes to his, and could not pull them away as he began to speak.

  “The Philosopher’s Stone, the object of alchemical labors that provides immortality and turns base metal to gold, is also called The Hermaphrodite. It is the union of all opposites. Male and female, hot and cool,” he said, his words like a chant. “The dry and the wet, the wise and the innocent, the red of the sulfur and the silver of mercury, the generative power of the sun and the reflective forces of the moon. Alchemical drawings depict this union as a king and a queen lying together in the coffin of their alembic. The Absolute, the Brahman, the Stone, the Tincture, is a union of Shiva and Shakti, destruction and nurturing, the seed and the blood, the male and the female. It is the stage beyond the gold, and it renders the participants immortal.

  “Since the first blacksmith discovered iron, man has been applying fire to dull stone and creating miracles. The unrefined human being, rocklike and dumb, is no different from gold-bearing ore. It takes only the right technique—the right knowledge—the proper manipulation of forces, to transmute a mere man into something greater, something miraculous. My Parsi master took me to meet immortals, men who could pierce themselves and not bleed, be bitten by cobras and not die. My teacher himself is three hundred and twelve years old, and looks to be sixty. Immortality and the power to heal, those are the characteristics of the human Philosopher’s Stones I have met.