A Darker Place

  In and out the paths zigzagged, into the hub and back to the edges, each of the outside buildings connecting with each other and with the center. It would make a neat geometrical pattern from the air, she thought, a cat’s cradle of pathways strung among the seven buildings. Why hadn’t Glen’s aerial photo shown it? Were the paths of crushed gravel too like the desert soil in color or the white stones too far apart to form a solid line? Or had she just missed it? And if so, what else had she missed?

  They were chanting in the meditation hall, not the “I am Change am I” rhythm or the 4/4 beat of “Great hope, great Change,” but something slower and choppier, four beats and a pause, four beats and a pause. She listened, and heard the word: Trans-for-ma-tion.

  Into change in a big way, was Steven.

  Ana continued on out to the bare site where the sixth and final building would go, back to the still-chanting hub, and up to the oldest of the surrounding structures, the dining hall.

  Ana let herself in, thinking to look again at the lovely Indian pots she had seen the very first night and looked at with pleasure every time she had passed by. One in particular was stunning, a glossy black-on-black bowl worth more than Rocinante and all she contained.

  She heard a sound, deep in the building. Not a kitchen noise, but a high, sharp squeak. She followed the hallway back to the dining hall, and soon the echoing thuds of a bouncing ball joined the squeaks: Someone was playing basketball.

  Jason.

  CHAPTER 14

  From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

  The boy was practicing crossovers, dribbling the ball up the court for a few steps and then shifting his body and taking the ball in the other hand for the next few steps, dodging imaginary opponents. As he neared the end, he lowered his body and sped up, springing up beside the basket for a layup shot. He veered outside the unmarked end line of the court to catch up the ball and started back up the other end again, alternating hands as he dribbled.

  He was very beautiful, a young human male as he was meant to be, rejoicing in perfect strength before his body discovered that there were things it could not do. For some reason the phrase “I sing the body electric” ran through her mind, and she refused to feel like a voyeur. He traveled the court three or four times while Ana stood leaning in the doorway with her hands in her pockets. She knew that he was aware of her presence—she had seen the faint falter and sideways glance when he first turned to go back up the court—but he ignored her, concentrating on the rhythm and on the use of his left hand.

  She could certainly sympathize. Privacy was a rare enough commodity in a communal enterprise, and it would be a gift of kindness if she were to back away and leave him to the echo of the ball and the squeal of his shoes on the polished floor. Instead, she hardened her heart and began to pluck off her outer garments until they lay in a pile on the bench and she stood in her jeans, long-sleeved T-shirt, and bare feet. She pushed her sleeves up to her elbows and went out onto the floor.

  “It’s very pretty,” she said to him without preliminary, “but it’s too slow. You get some kid out there with quick hands, you’re going to lose the ball every time you go past him.”

  Jason had stopped, and stood now with the ball balanced against his hip, his chest rising and falling beneath his sleeveless T-shirt, just watching her, expressionless.

  “Here, I’ll show you what I mean,” she said. Settling down as far as her knee would permit, she stretched out her arms in the guard’s position and wiggled her fingers to indicate that he should come at her. He simply stood there. “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I know old women like me don’t play basketball, but there’s nobody here to see you, and who knows? You might learn something. At the very least you’ll embarrass me so that I go away and leave you in peace.”

  She waited, so long that she was beginning to think that she had underestimated the depth of his need for dignity and credited him with more curiosity than he actually possessed. He waited until her knee was protesting and her doubt was building, and then he dropped the ball to the floor and came at her, driving fast straight down the court until the very last instant, when he shifted and went to the side.

  But he did not take the ball with him. Instead, it was traveling back down the court in the hands of this woman with the almost-shaved head, who furthermore came to a halt well outside where the key would be and shot the ball toward the basket. It dropped neatly in. She trotted forward to retrieve the ball and turned back toward him, laughing.

  “Now, there was a lucky shot,” she said. “I haven’t done that in years.” She tucked the ball under her left arm and put out her right hand. “Call me Ana. The shortest member of the women’s varsity team in high school, tied for second highest score for the season. Couldn’t guard, never made a rebound, and slow on my feet, but I had a talent for long shots and I had quick hands. Once upon a time, years before you were born,” she added with a grin.

  Reluctantly and briefly, Jason let his fingers brush hers. She passed him the ball and moved down the court, taking up a position in front of her basket.

  The rhythm of the ball smacking up against the boards started up again, slowly, while he considered things, and then more rapidly when he began to move toward her. He was no longer trying to intimidate her, Ana was glad to see, and he no longer discounted her entirely as a human being. Not that he took her seriously yet, but he was determined to prove to himself that what she had done was a fluke.

  It was not. The only difference this time was when Ana tried for a basket, the ball bounced off the backboard and flew into the stacked benches. She talked as she retrieved it.

  “You’re good, Jason; you don’t need me to tell you that. But I don’t think you’ve had much chance to play against very many top-rank players, and I doubt you’ve had any really good coaches. I was always a second-rate player, but I learned a lot from the good people around me, and I was lucky to have a coach who was a retired professional with a love for girls’ basketball. We had four or five of our players go on to university scholarships—this at a time when there was no money at all for girls’ sports, when girls did cheerleading or synchronized swimming or gymnastics, period. You want to know how not to get your ball stolen by a pair of quick hands? Come here.”

  She took him through it in slow motion, so he could see precisely how he was leaving himself open, then she showed him how to pace himself, how to move the ball to the free hand just a shade earlier, so it would already be on the downward trajectory when his opponent was reaching out, and how to extend his elbow and shoulder as he swept the ball aside, blocking the other’s outstretched fingers and giving the ball a boost of speed at a vital moment.

  He was a fast learner, and after a dozen or so tries, Ana was only occasionally able to snatch the ball away from him. Four times in a row he dodged around her, and she could only brush her fingers across the rough surface, although once she would have had it, had her knee given her enough speed. It did not, and she did not, and she stood grinning and applauding as Jason scooted past her, stopped outside the key, and shot—missing the basket.

  She wiped her forehead with the back of her arm and watched the boy move. She was drenched with sweat, her muscles were quivering, and her knee felt as if she were walking on a red-hot steel rod, but she was more than satisfied. Contact had been made. Not conversation, perhaps—Jason’s only words to her had been monosyllabic answers to direct questions—but a beginning. To what, she did not know, nor did she wish to ask. She could only tell that the physical exertion with a boy she had no real excuse for approaching had been deeply satisfying, an antidote to the cerebral jousting she had done with Steven.

  Ana gathered up her clothing and limped away. The thuds of the ball and the squeals of shoes on floor started up again as soon as she was out of the dining hall.

  The following morning, she went to see Steven.

  Ana rose early and walked out into the desert, a ritual that had already become a necessary part of her day
, half an hour when the world was hers alone, when she did not need to watch herself, think of every word, consider each gesture. She walked and breathed and took joy in the early-morning life of the high desert, the skunks and wild pigs, the tiny pygmy owl returning to its home in a saguaro, and once a family of coatis flickering along the floor of a wash, tails high and long noses snuffling. Snakes were too lethargic to be a concern, scorpions were still asleep, and for some reason, few Change members ventured out of the compound.

  This morning, however, one person was at large aside from those residents heading for a car or the milking sheds, a person dressed in shorts and a sweatshirt, running easily along the side of the road. She knew ‘without pausing to think’ just who it was, knew even though she could not make out anything other than his dark hair in the dim light. Jason was on another morning run, trying to get rid of some of that energy that burned in him.

  He ran fast, his head bent, and she watched him for a moment. Who would be the more embarrassed, she wondered wryly, if he were to find out that he had a forty-eight-year-old admirer? She shook her head and turned her back on him; she needed to concentrate on the coming interview with the community’s founders.

  Steven Change, she had decided, was a natural and unconscious manipulator rather than a deliberate one, more a distorting mirror than a calculating plotter. He was very quick to pick up hints and intimations, turn them around, and give them back in their reworked form to their owner, but Ana was not convinced that he considered what he was doing. As far as she could see, Steven believed in himself, was convinced that this showman’s knack was the pure manifestation of his religious authority.

  This made him more dangerous—a messiah convinced of his own divinity was always the least likely to listen to reason—but it also made him easier to get around for a person able to match his abilities, precisely because he would be unaware that for others the gift of prophetic speech could be a conscious and deliberate means of manipulation: a trick.

  He was not by nature a cynical or suspicious man, but he was highly intelligent, which meant that Ana had to be extremely careful. As always in these situations, her biggest problem was concealing her knowledge. She might have left her personality behind, but she could not lose her brain, and Anne Waverly was, after all, a historian with a specialty in alternative religious movements, qualified to offer instant analyses of the roots and precedents of pretty much anything resembling a religion. Early Church heresies, doctrinal controversies, the influence of Islam, the contributions of Judaism, and the effects of the Reformation were all at her fingertips, and beyond Christianity, the modern influences of the East, from Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky to neo-Hinduism, Reverend Moon, and the Heaven’s Gate comet-seekers.

  Ana Wakefield, though, did not know all this. Ana Wakefield’s concept of religious inquiry was experiential and personal, not academic, and if she knew anything at all about Theosophy, it was because someone had once given her a book on Krishnamurti.

  Ana Wakefield knew a little bit about a lot of religious traditions, but the only one she knew intimately was the Christianity of her fictional Midwest childhood, a revelational, New Testament Christianity supplemented by her own early rebellious excursions into the foreign territory of the Old Testament. In dealing with Steven Change, Ana could not know too much or come on too strong. She must somehow suggest to him an immense and untapped potential beneath her innocence. She must present herself as an undiscovered, unspoiled treasure ready and willing to respond to his teaching. Ana Wakefield: every teacher’s dream student, a seed ripe and wanting only soil and water to burst into lush growth.

  She walked for an hour, trying to think herself into the person she needed to be and finding it inexplicably difficult. She had done it before. Four times, in fact, had she presented herself behind a new mask. In North Dakota, twelve years before, she had been a lone woman needing to be taken in hand by the protective men of the survivalist community Glen was interested in. Three years later she went to Miami to inquire happily about Satanism, trying hard to make her amusement at their antics look like the pleasure of enlightenment. Then on the heels of that case… Utah. In Utah she had never really been able to construct a plausible persona, because the social dynamics of that community had already begun to turn inward, and whatever she did, she could only be an outsider, forever a source of distrust. It had proved disastrous, fatal for five adults, two children, and nearly her.

  In Kansas, though, with Martin Cranmer, she had slipped easily into the household, a potentially useful female damaged and made prickly by the ills of a corrupt society, wanting only the right man—Cranmer—and the right message to make her a good woman once more.

  This time it ought to be easy. Here she was, a New Age seeker faced with an exciting community and hints of an intriguing religious experience. She fit here far better than any of the other four places she had entered. The face she was about to present to Steven Change was close enough to her own to be comfortable, nearly natural.

  Yet she was distracted. A bare ten days before she had come into the compound not really caring if she succeeded or not—half wanting, if the truth be told, to fail and prove Glen wrong. Then she had met Dulcie, and her brother, and for some reason as she walked attempting to picture the face she needed to be, she saw theirs instead. It was disconcerting at first, then annoying. Finally she just threw up her hands and decided the problem must be that she really was too close to being Ana Wakefield, that it was futile to work at constructing something that already existed.

  She went to find Steven in his office just inside the entrance to the building that held the kitchen and dining hall. Thomas Mallory was there, too. Ana had consigned Steven’s second in command to the category of Professional Shadow, one of those attracted to leadership but incapable of it. It showed a great deal of sense on Steven’s part not to have given Mallory a permanent Change center of his own; as his temporary leadership in Los Angeles had demonstrated, any place given to him would have fallen apart in a matter of months.

  Instead, Mallory accompanied Steven whenever the Change leader left the compound, acting as secretary, calling himself bodyguard (for which role he dressed all in black, wore dark wrap-around sunglasses, and taught a class in karate in the evenings—wearing a black belt). Mallory delighted in stirring up discontent among the other potential shadows, his inferiors in the hierarchy. Ana had spoken to him twice, and thought that he would not recognize her in a lineup. He only glanced at her this time, too, before saying, “He’s on the phone. It’s an important call, and he may be a while.”

  She sat down. “I can wait.”

  It annoyed him, as she had known it would, although there was not much he could do about it. He hunched his muscular little body over his paperwork, lips pursed tight. She sat and waited.

  She could hear the sound of Steven’s voice, though not the words. He seemed to listen a great deal, and contribute only brief phrases, for a long time. Fifteen, twenty minutes crawled by, and though she was careful to show no impatience, she could feel Mallory’s growing satisfaction in this small vengeance.

  Eventually, Steven seemed to have outlasted the speaker on the other end of the line. His answers grew longer, his tones sharper, until one stretch of perhaps three minutes, when he spoke continuously. He stopped, listened, said a few words, went silent again, and finally launched into the truncated rhythm of farewells. Silence fell. After a minute the inner door opened and Steven came out, already speaking to his right-hand man.

  “Jonas is getting all worked up about—” He saw Ana and caught himself. “Good morning, Ana.”

  “I wanted to have a word with you. I can come back later if this isn’t a good time.” But, damnation, how she wished he had finished that sentence first.

  “This is fine,” he said. “Thomas, remind me to give Jonas a ring before dinner, see what’s happened during the day. Come on in. A cup of tea to warm you up after your morning walk?”

  “Thank you, that wo
uld be nice.” She took a chair in front of the open fire, placed the armful of heavy outerwear on the floor at her side, and planted her sandy hiking boots on the floor in front of her while Steven went over to a small sink-and-electric-kettle kitchen arrangement in the corner. He asked her two or three general questions while waiting for the water to boil, and she gave him general answers while studying the room.

  This was a public room, intended for consultations not only with Change members but with outsiders as well. The bookshelves were impressive, their contents generic and little used, with many titles on psychology, educational theory, and the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. The art was a combination of Western landscapes and small sculptures from the East, with a nice bronze nataraj taking pride of place above the fireplace. She wondered briefly whether the statue depicting Shiva dancing amid the flames of the earth’s destruction meant anything to him other than a decorative piece of tourist art.

  “Milk?”

  “Please,” she said, and reached out for the mug. When she took a sip, she nearly choked: The tea was Earl Grey.

  Fortunately, Steven had turned to lower himself into the chair across from her, for he could not have missed her look of shock as Antony Makepeace flitted through her mind and was gone again.

  “I’m glad you came to talk with me, Ana. I always like to get to know new members. Teresa tells me you’ve been helping out in the school. What do you think of it?”

  “It is impressive. The kids are impressive.”

  “Yes. Ironic, considering how grateful society is to get rid of them. We couldn’t have a stronger bunch of kids if we had the entire school system to pick from, rather than a handful of castoffs.”

  “You’re allowed some choice, then?”