Ana looked down at her feet, where the pieces of the crockery tureen were still rocking, and she began to shake. Deirdre, pretty young Deirdre with the golden hair like young Claudia’s, began to gather up the pieces. Someone else—Vicky?—was speaking in an urgent and worried voice right in Ana’s ear. Ana pushed the voice away and bolted for the small washroom just inside the back door, where Vicky found her retching violently into the toilet.
When nothing was left for her body to get rid of, Ana sat back on her heels, gasping and shivering.
“Are you okay?” Vicky asked for the tenth time. This time Ana responded.
“I’ll be fine. What the hell was that noise?”
“Terrible, wasn’t it? Peter’s usually pretty good at sneaking up on the animals so they don’t know what’s happening, but I guess the pig saw him coming. Pigs aren’t stupid.”
“A pig. Christ.”
“It doesn’t happen very often, honestly it doesn’t,” Vicky told her earnestly. “Almost never.”
“I could see why you wouldn’t want that every day. The kids must be freaking out.” At least the room shared by Dulcie and Jason was on the far side of the house. They might even have missed it entirely. She gave a last shudder and got to her feet, which reassured her attendant into stepping back and leaving her alone.
She splashed her face, rinsed her mouth out, and stood with her head bowed over the small hand basin for a minute, waiting for equilibrium to set in. She took a few slow breaths and raised her face to the mirror, and then she did lose control, well and truly.
Her face was the only clean thing in the mirror. Her hair was a red-brown cap plastered against her head. Her once-yellow T-shirt was mostly the same brown color, dotted with individual kidney beans, bits of green pepper, and one slice of sausage lodged in a fold. Her legs were brown, her feet indistinguishable from her sandals, and her skin felt as if she had a sunburn beneath a drying mud pack. She was a sight.
The women in the kitchen looked up at her entrance, alarmed at the snorting noises she was emitting. Ana checked for a moment at the appearance of the room, but then she caught sight of three beans nestling on the top of Deirdre’s head, and she doubled over in uncontrollable hilarity.
The giggles spread, until the kitchen and a rapidly growing audience were deep in half-hysterical laughter, gales of it that were renewed at each new discovery of the scope of the disaster. Ana finally had to leave, staggering brown and sticky upstairs toward the bath. She did not know if she wanted to share her colorful state with Dulcie and Jason or to hide it from them, but the choice did not come up, and she was soon safely locked in the bathroom with the water running.
After dinner, she joined the group meditation for the first time. She found it strangely disappointing, a colorless round of chanting and silence followed by a flat sermonette by Marc Bennett. The brittle edginess of the community was neither increased nor dispersed by the hour spent in the hall, but it lay under their actions and was resumed at the door when they left.
Ana spotted Sara coming out and went over to talk to her. After asking about the condition of the baby cabbages and confirming what Sara had heard about the disaster in the kitchen earlier, she tipped her head back toward the meditation hall and commented, “I’d have thought that Jonas would lead the meditations.”
“He used to a lot, but not in the last few months. Which is fine,” Sara admitted, lowering her voice, “because his meditations were getting a little… confusing. He’s too lifted up for my little brain to follow. How are things going with you?”
“Fine,” Ana told her. “Just fine.”
She made her way upstairs and found Dulcie still awake, so she settled down with her and they read the remainder of the church mice story, as well as one of Ana’s personal favorites, a book she had bought Dulcie in Sedona and which was already looking worn, the story of Ferdinand, the least-testosterone-burdened bull in all of Spain. Ana then went back down to the kitchen to spend an hour scrubbing the cabinet fronts with a toothbrush and to drink a cup of tea, and then she exchanged good-nights with the others and went back upstairs.
It was not until she was brushing her teeth that she remembered her midnight visit from Jonas. I’ll come for you, he had said; be ready.
The last thing on earth she wanted was another session with the Bear, but there was not much she could do to avoid it. She sat in her room and tried to read the Jung book through drooping eyelids, until lights-out came and she decided that either Jonas had forgotten her in the heat of his calculations or he had been distracted and would send his summons when he damn well pleased. She might as well go to bed.
Still, she dressed for bed in clothes that could as easily serve as actual daywear, in case he crashed through her door again at two in the morning. She pulled on her better, light gray sweatpants in place of the dark blue ones with the hole in the knee, and a white T-shirt with the banana-slug logo of U.C. Santa Cruz on the place where the breast pocket would have been, and got into bed. After a while, she got up again and removed the folded diary pages from her slippers, putting them instead under the inner sole of her running shoes. Then she climbed under the covers and slid away into sleep.
CHAPTER 30
From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield);
reproduction of the coniunctio stage of the alchemical process
from the Rosarium Philosophorum, Frankfurt, 1550
Jonas did not come crashing through her
Instead, she dreamed.
What came to her that night was not one
of her usual innocuous dreams with emotional overtones, but a true nightmare, rare and vivid, and causing the flesh to creep. It was as if her mind were reminding her that the flashback she had experienced had not been healed by the laughter, only hidden.
She dreamed she was driving in a car with Abby, going home, and she decided to take a different route from the one they usually took. After all, what good was it to have a Land Rover if you couldn’t take a muddy dirt road occasionally?
So they turned off the main road onto the mud track deeply surrounded by trees, and drove with the branches pressing close on the windows. Then they were walking, with that seamlessness of dream logic, still going home, heading down a stone passageway with a backpack resting between her shoulder blades and hiking boots on her feet, with Abby in front of her and other people behind, all of them everyday commuters like herself, going home. The walls of the passageway grew closer, the ceiling lower and lower, until the tunnel was nothing more than a low horizontal gap in the stone.
Ana knew it was passable—not only for Abby, who had already vanished through the crack and gone before her, but everyone behind her seemed so matter-of-fact, she knew this must be a normal occurrence for them, just another part of the commute.
So she lay down onto her back, the pack cushioning the rock, and scooted along, feetfirst, into the gap. There was a distinct slope that made forward progress not only possible, but unavoidable, so she lay in the position of a luge racer, except with her arms stretched up over her head because of the low roof, and let herself slide down after Abby.
Only she did not come through the other side. Her boots caught on the roof of the gap, and she was stuck. There was no space above her body to allow her to turn her hips, so her knees could not bend and find purchase for her boots; there was no way to bring her arms down to push herself back up the slope, because the sides were too narrow. Her fingers could find nothing to grab onto above her head: She was trapped in the rock with no way to push or pull herself back up the slope, and she could hear the man behind her preparing to launch himself after her, but when she tried to draw a deep breath to call for help, the rock pushed down on her chest, and she could feel the horror of being enveloped rising up in her and—
She jolted awake, drenched in sweat, the implacable pressure of the rock face pressing against her trapped boots, and tingling up the front of her helpless legs. It was one of the most gruesome dreams she had ev
er experienced, and she had to get up and walk up and down, rubbing at the front of her legs before the sensation of entrapment left her.
There would be no sleep after that.
What she badly needed was either a long walk or a trashy novel, but she could not go out and she would have bet that such a thing did not exist under this roof. Instead, she sat down on her hard chair and opened her diary by the light of the floods, and forced herself to concentrate on an elaborate drawing of the abbey ruins.
After three botched efforts, the immediacy of the dream faded a little, and the drawing became easier. Eventually she turned to draw a boojum tree, and although it occurred to her that the mysterious snark might well live in a low gash in a rock tunnel, the image did not come to life, and she continued to draw lizards and rocks and even, thinking of Jason, a cat.
She was deep into her pointless labors when a small sound knocked her out of her artistic reverie, a noise both unfamiliar and disconcertingly reminiscent of some evil experience. She strained to hear over the sudden pounding in her ears, and waited for it to come again.
When the sound was repeated, she knew instantly why it had acted like a cattle prod on her distracted mind. She covered the distance to the door in two steps, yanked it open, and looked down at Dulcie, in pink-flowered nightgown and bare feet. She had her teddy bear in her arms, and she didn’t look cold; other than that, it was all terribly familiar. She pulled the child inside and closed the door.
“What’s the matter, Dulcie?” she said in a low voice.
“They took Jason again,” the child whimpered. “He told me to be a big girl and go back to sleep, but I can’t.”
Ana shushed her rising voice and gave her a brisk hug. “That’s fine, Dulcie. I told you to come here anytime, and I’m glad you did. Now, why don’t you hop into my bed and see if you can follow Jason’s advice?”
“Not Jason,” the child said, obediently climbing up into Ana’s bed.
“Jason didn’t tell you to go back to sleep, you mean? Then who was it?”
“That Man.”
“Jonas? You mean Jonas came to get your brother?”
“With the loud man.” Ana identified this second person without difficulty as Marc Bennett.
“That’s okay,” she said, though she feared it would not be. “We’ll settle it like we did before. Now, night-night.”
“But where are you going to sleep?” Dulcie asked. Ana looked at the hard wooden chair and the hard wooden floor, and in the end she pulled up the blankets and got in next to Dulcie. The child curled up and snuggled into Ana with a grunt of contentment. Slowly, deliberately, Ana brought her arm up and wrapped it around the thin, warm body next to her.
“Ana?”
“Yes, Dulcie.”
“I’m scared.”
“What, because of Jason?” The wild mop of black hair nodded beneath Ana’s chin. “Don’t be, sweetheart. It’s like before, he’s gone to do some work, only this time it’s with Jonas instead of Steven. Big boys have work to do.”
“He was scared, too.”
“Jason was?” Surprising, how normal her voice sounded, how little concerned, when her gut was clenched around a block of ice.
“He pretended he wasn’t, but he was. I can tell.”
“I’ll bet you can.”
“He was scared before, when Thomas and Danny came and got him,” the child continued inexorably, the words pushed out of her by fear for her brother. “He was scared, and when he came back he wouldn’t tell me what happened, but it made him have bad dreams, and Jason doesn’t usually have bad dreams, not like me. And now they took him away again and he was even more scared than he was before.”
She lay in Ana’s embrace, waiting desperately for adult reassurance that it was going to be all right, and Ana struggled to find an answer to give her. She never lied to a child if she could possibly avoid it, and she did not want to lie to Dulcie now. For one thing, she knew how good children were at picking up unspoken messages, and she doubted that giving Dulcie any more reassuring words crossed with the pheromones of dread would help matters at all. On the other hand, it was cruel to burden a young person with adult weakness and doubt just when strength was needed most.
In the end, she gave Dulcie a squeeze and told her, “Dulcinea, I don’t know what’s going on either, but as soon as people are up and around, I’ll find out. I’m with you, Dulcie. You’re not alone.”
That seemed to be the right approach, or at least one adequate enough to allow the child eventually to relax back into the safety of sleep.
Not the adult, though. There were no words reassuring enough to quiet the bone-deep trembling Ana could feel inside. Spiritual hypothermia, she diagnosed, striving for humorous detachment; optimal treatment to include a familiar woodstove, two dogs, and the warm company of friends. Although at this point she would settle even for Glen’s icy presence—anything but to be there alone with deadly decisions before her.
She was jamming herself down between a rock and a hard place, to be sure, but she was also standing on a high wire, balancing over two abysses.
On the one side was Jason, who was a part of her in ways she could not begin to understand, and who at that moment, while Ana lay with the limp figure of his sister clasped to her, might well be staring at the dim interior of a second metal alembic—this time under the far-from-gentle protection of Marc Bennett and Jonas Seraph.
On the other side lay the massive responsibility she had for this community. The physician’s oath to Do no harm was paramount in every aspect of the work she did with Glen. It infused her daily life while in the communities she investigated with the urgent need to tread lightly, to slip into a preset role and slip out again, leaving no trace. Her work for Glen had always been based on the idea that the long-term effect was the only goal, the larger good more important than the individual. In earlier cases, her heart had occasionally ached at the mistreatment, as she saw it, of the community’s children or one of the adults who found himself to be a round peg faced with a square doctrinal hole, but she had rarely succumbed to the temptation to interfere, knowing that in the long run, Glen and his agency would sort it out. Uncomfortable and uncertain as she might be about Glen, when it came down to it, she trusted him. He would do what was needed.
Now the question was turned around on her. Jason’s welfare was at stake here, and it appeared to demand an immediate and aggressive action that Glen was not there to provide. But, could she trust her own judgment? The persistent intrusion of Anne Waverly’s past and personality into the body and actions of Ana Wakefield, the increasing incursions of memory that had come to a head in yesterday’s devastatingly real flashback, were confusing her. She was aware of a constant jittery anxiety focused on the two children, and she worried that Anne’s frantic concern for the boy was severely hindering Ana’s ability to remain the passive, open-minded individual she desperately needed to be. It was obvious to the rational side of her mind that she was well and truly losing it, hagridden by the specters of her past just at the time she most needed to be clearheaded and objective.
Long, long ago, when a thirty-year-old Anne Waverly entered the university graduate program eighteen years before, she had begun by building a persona on the wreckage of her former life. She had paved over the rubble, sealed up the debris of catastrophe with the clear, hard shell of academic discipline. When that cracked a bare three years after it had been laid down, when the snapshot of Abby had rumbled through her and pitched her into the darker corners of her mind, what had dragged her out again was Glen, who happened along to use her and bully her and incidentally show her the way to survival: to split herself into two persons, one rooted in either side of the events of Texas, two individuals whose only point of joining was the bridge crossing into an investigation, and later leaving it.
Now that bridge was disintegrating, cracked in a hundred places, and the events of the past were welling up out of the dark abyss beneath her. Marla Makepeace, no doubt, would be ju
bilant, considering it a healing and whole-making event; to Ana it felt like being overtaken by birth pangs in a collapsing building. She had to control the process, just for long enough to get out and into safety. She simply could not afford it now. Jason and Dulcie could not afford it.
She must have tightened her grip on the child, because Dulcie stirred briefly, then subsided.
So, could she trust herself in this state? Her mind was urging caution and rationality, forcing her to admit that the individual threats she had seen here did not necessarily add up to the sort of desperate scenario her inner eye was putting together: An antagonistic attitude toward the authorities, a man in the woods carrying a shotgun, a titular leader who was thinly connected with reality, and a de facto leader who was overly full of himself. That was it. Everything else came from her and her strange ties to two children, and all of it was tainted by her own past. Dulcie reminded her of Abby—that was where the cracks had begun. And then Bennett looked like Martin Cranmer, and the woods made her nervous, and by the time the pantry and the communal phobia about outsiders entered into the equation, she was so sensitized to parallels that a particular brand of pencil would take on an ominous significance. She had no business being there, no right to jeopardize everything by making decisions that could be based only on irrationality. The best thing for everyone would be if she were to stand up and walk away from the compound.
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