A Darker Place (54 page)

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 backward 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 gases. 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 side 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.

Long hours crept by. The noises of dinner built up overhead, feet slow and quick, heavy tread and the light patter of children. She found herself salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs when the sounds paused for the evening meal, and then the feet sounds resumed for the after-dinner chores. There was another pause during evening meditation, a lesser buildup of noise when that was finished, and finally all the noises faded away. The house quieted. Water, hot or cold, did nothing to satisfy hunger. The muscles of her shoulders and back burned in any position, and even the volumes of erotica lost their ability to distract after the first half-dozen. She found herself eyeing the delicate Japanese pictures of couples (and more) coupling, wondering if the pictures were printed on edible rice paper.

She hadn’t heard a footstep overhead for at least half an hour, which put it close to midnight, when a noise came from outside the door. Struggling stiffly to pull herself upright from her nest of towels, she waited, her heart racing. A single pair of heavy feet descended the wooden stairs; half a minute later a key scraped in the lock. The door opened. Jonas stepped back, allowing her to emerge.

His dark eyes studied her, looked in at the small room, and came back to her face. “Did you enjoy my library?” he asked her.

She gaped at him. “Did I—? Well, no, to tell you the truth. Not under the circumstances. I didn’t even have my reading glasses.”

He nodded as if that were the only consideration, then asked, “Did you wash yourself?”

“Not very well, but—”

“That should do it, then.”

“What?”

“Good night, Ana.” He reached forward then, immobilized her head between his powerful hands, and bent to kiss her mouth, briefly but with a thoroughness so reminiscent of Aaron that it made Anne’s scalp tingle. Before she could react, before she knew whether the tingle was lust or revulsion, the bearded mouth left hers. Then she felt his thick fingers enter the neck of her polo shirt to draw out the buckskin pouch and pull it over her head.

He picked open the drawstring top with surprisingly delicate fingernails and shook the contents onto the palm of his hand, turning them over curiously with one thick finger. The bead, tufts of fur from the dogs, stones, and bee pollen he funneled back into the pouch, but he took the silver crescent that she had bought in Sedona between two fingers and turned it back and forth, watching the light play across the low indentations of its beaten surface.

“The moon revels in the reflected glory of the sun,” he mused. “In alchemical allegory, Luna reaches the height of her existence in her conjoining with the sun.” He turned the pendant around again, and said, “Come.”

She followed him reluctantly past the stairs that led to open air and back into his study. He went over to the strange collection of bones and objects at the third window, detached one item from the rest, and brought it back to her, displayed on his palm, its leather cord dangling down the back of his hand. It was the rough moon-shaped object she had noticed earlier, an elongated, worn silver nugget threaded onto a thong. He smiled to himself, the same private smile she had seen as he caressed the altar stone in the abbey ruins with his fingertips, and then he curled the thong around the moon shape and pushed it into the buckskin pouch and drew the bag shut.

“I’d like you to take that,” he said. “It is… appropriate that you should have it.”

Anne studied him, and asked slowly, “Why? Whose necklace is that?”

“It belonged to Samantha Dooley, who is no longer with us,” he told her. “She did not, shall we say, live up to expectations.”

Still smiling to himself, he tied the pouch snugly shut and dropped the cord back around her neck. He tucked the medicine bag inside her shirt and then tugged her collar up to hide it, a gesture that was somehow even more intimate than the kiss he had given her. “You may wear it,” he said.