Jason looked up, and frowned at the expression on her face. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” she told him. “My dear Jason, it’s nothing at all. Sleep well. We’ll talk tomorrow.” She left the room and closed the door on the two children, blessedly unaware that there would be no tomorrow.
CHAPTER 31
page 2 of 2
Change: Are you sure you’re okay, Jonas?
Seraph: I told you I was fine. Stop harassing me, Steven.
Change: Okay, okay. You just sound troubled, is all. Arc you sure the Social Services thing is off your neck? I could come over and—
Seraph [shouting]: Steven! Enough! [a silence]
Change: I’m sorry, Jonas. You know best, of course.
Seraph: And before you ask me, no the work has not progressed. But I think it shall, very soon. I think I’ve seen the problem. Your friend Ana showed me it, in fact
Change: Oh, that’s really great news, Jonas. I don’t suppose you want a hand with keeping the fire hot? Like the old days?
Seraph [laughing]: No, Steven, I don’t think that will be a problem.
Change: Shell be helping you, I suppose. Ana. The boy can’t be that far along yet
Seraph [laughing]: Ana Wakefield will indeed help me in the great work.
Change: The great work? Jonas, what are you going to do?
Seraph: I am going to perform a transformation, Steven.
Change: But what kind, Jonas? Jonas, what do you have planned?
Seraph: You’re not listening to me, Steven. I told you. Transformation.
Change: Jonas, listen. You’re not-
Seraph: I have to go now, Steven.
Change: Jonas, Look-I was thinking today that maybe it’s time to go on that trip to Bombay we were talking about. I could phone… you know, and see if he could see us.
Seraph: Good bye, Steven.
Change: Jonas, wait! Don’t hang up. I need to [connection cut]. Damn.
[end of transcription]
Excerpt from the transcription of a telephone conversation between
Steven Change and Jonas Fairweather (aka Jonas Seraph),
1:34 A.M. GMT, May 24, 199_
Anne Waverly continued upstairs to her own room, and to bed, and she drifted away into the first easy sleep she had found since getting on the plane. It was such a vast, earth-shaking relief, to know that she was just plain nuts, to know that her poor twisted imagination had simply carried her away, to know at last that everyone was safe. Not least of all was the half-humorous satisfaction of knowing that after the mess she’d made of understanding Change, Glen McCarthy would never ask her to do another job for him, ever again.
She had thought Jonas Seraph capable of insane violence. However, now it appeared that the most violent act the Bear was interested in was a sort of Tantric union with her. His primary goal seemed to be convincing another generation of followers that they, too, could make gold. She had thought Jason locked inside an alembic; instead, he had been set the task of a medieval apprentice. She had even believed that Jason was converting to Change doctrine, but now—the joy of his phrase “weird shit” rang in her ears, and she slipped into sleep with a smile on her lips, allowing herself to wonder what the two Delgado children would make of Anne Waverly’s silent cabin in the woods.
She slept, and the house slept, unaware that below in the depths, the signs and portents of the last day were coming together in the mind of Jonas Seraph, freeing the fiery serpents from their mortal bondage. He gloried in this Woman, in what she had brought him and what she would do for him, and he labored hard to finish the preparations for this last and greatest Work of his lifetime. After so many trials and failures, after the disastrous mistake of thinking Sami would be the moon to his sun, the silver to his gold, after so many petty deceptions of gullible minds for the sake of perpetuating the whole, all the years of seeing one Work after another go dead and dry, at last it was upon him. Sami had been a mistake. Her energies in the end proved insufficient, her dedication no match for his own. That last Work with her had nearly robbed him of his confidence, reduced him to a thing as dead as she. Not this time. Soon, very soon, the final Transformation would be his. Every so often he paused to look up through the narrow windows, until at last he saw what he knew would be there, waiting for him: a delicate crescent, the first night of the new moon. And it was good.
The house slept, the moon rose and faded, and then at two o’clock in the morning, the peaceful, dignified Victorian mansion seemed to exhale sharply. The heavy cough jolted the building from one wing to the other; it startled the birds from their nests, set the dogs to barking, and reached down through the thick layers of fatigue and drugs to jerk Anne Waverly upright. She did not know what had woken her, but she heard the dogs and after a minute became aware of a strange vibration in the air, a distant roar almost too low to register as noise. She thrust her bare feet into her shoes and opened her door. Down the hall she saw movement as another person stepped out of a door on the opposite side.
“Did you smell smoke?” the woman said tentatively.
“Oh, God,” Anne cried in despair. “Call 911,” she ordered, starting down the hall in the other direction. “I’ll wake the kids.”
“Nine one one?”
“The fire department,” Anne shouted over her shoulder, and then drew a deep breath to bellow into the night the alarm of “Fire!”
She flew along the corridor and down the stairs, making as much noise as she could, banging on doors, shouting continuously. Others had heard or smelled the danger and were doing the same. Screams built, one door after another flew open, the occupants rushing toward the stairs and safety.
When she reached Jason and Dulcie’s room, the hallway was filled with running adults and children and the door to their room was standing open. She wasted agonized seconds looking under the beds and checking the bath down the hall, but they were gone. She could only pray with her very bones they had heard the alarm and run outside with everyone else.
The old house was going up like the stack of tinder it was. No need for a bomb made of fuel oil and nitrate fertilizer when one had a century-and-a-half-old house kept dry by its radiators, Anne thought in a brief bolt of rationality before she returned to the impossible task of checking the rooms.
She found one child sitting upright and rigid with terror as the flames broke through at the end of the corridor and roared full-throated at them. Anne snatched up the girl and fled down the back stairs, feeling the house trying to come down on her head.
The night air was thick with ashes and smuts and the fire leapt and swallowed with nothing to stand in its way. Beneath the noise of the blast furnace, adults shouted and cried out, children wailed, dogs barked and howled wildly, and the horses in the field screamed out their terror. Anne thought once she heard a siren in the distance, but nothing came near, and none of the residents caught shivering in the dancing light had any way of knowing that some of the popping glass they heard was actually gunfire, as Change guards in camouflage suits, unaware of what was happening, took potshots at the emergency vehicles gathering at the gates.
Anne was more interested in the absence of the only two people who meant anything to her. She pushed her way frantically up and down through panicked clusters of people, demanding if anyone had seen the two American kids. She found Sara, who looked at her uncomprehendingly from beneath a bloody scalp wound, and Deirdre, who was herself unscathed, although the woman she was with, probably her mother, was curled on the ground clutching her leg, white-faced with pain. Neither had seen Jason and Dulcie. Some of the adults were gathering the children together at a distance from the buildings. Two women ran up with an armload of first aid kits they had retrieved from the Change vehicles, dodging three white-eyed horses that pounded through the yard and vanished, freed with the other animals from the burning barns. Men and women staggered up to the place of refuge laden with horse blankets, buckets of water, and a couple of highly unnecessary kerosene la
nterns, but their paltry attempts at organization amid the maelstrom of heat and the battering confusion of noise and panic was like a nest of ants working dumbly to restore order as the ground was being uprooted around their heads.
Anne dodged through the chaos of running adults in nightwear, past clusters of terrified children, around strange heaps of possessions that had been rescued and then abandoned—a sofa, three closed suitcases, a bed-sheet wrapped around a tangle of clothing and framed photographs—looking for Dulcie and Jason. The cacophony of noise beat at her, the heat was a blaring, monstrous force, the bright, leaping illumination alternating with black, stretched-out shadows created a surrealist vision from hell, and Anne would have given five years of her life for a single deep breath of cool, smoke-free air.
And still she could find no sign of them. She stood for a moment in the lee of a wide, scorched-smelling oak tree and tried to gather her thoughts. Other than the house, which possibility Anne’s mind refused to consider, there was only one place they could be. She wiped the edge of her white T-shirt across her filthy face and prepared to turn her back on the moaning adults and the screaming children—only to be grabbed by the shoulders and shaken furiously by a maddened figure shouting and spitting in her face. It took a moment to see Marc Bennett beneath the soot and the distorting terror and fury, and to interpret his words as a demand to know where Jonas was.
Her own fury flared to meet his. She shook off his grasping hands and slapped him hard, and when he took a surprised step backward she leaned into him, ten inches shorter and ready to tear him to pieces.
“You stupid piece of shit,” she spat at him. “Your beloved tin-pot god went nuts. He went and sat in your alembic and set the place on fire around him, to see if he could make himself immortal.”
“What are you talking about? What alembic?”
“The steel alembic you have in your basement. The one you use to lock boys in when they misbehave.” God, she didn’t have time for this. She tried to push past him, but he grabbed her right shoulder again and pulled her back to face him.
“You’re the mad one here, you bloody woman. That’s Steven’s alembic you’re thinking of. Now, where the hell is Jonas?”
Anne gaped at him, and her own hand came out to grasp his upper arm. The two of them stood as if they were hanging on to each other for support in the flaring, feverish light of the fire.
“Are you telling me you don’t have an alembic?” she demanded.
“You think you know the first thing about us, all the high secrets, don’t you? You don’t know shit. We don’t have an alembic for initiates. We don’t need one. The whole place is an alembic.” He freed his hand to gesture at the house, and she followed his fingers to see the stepped-up pear-shaped wall of the front of the house, now devoured in flames, and the chimneys at the top gathered together like a stem—or like a plug at the neck of a vessel. As she watched, one of the chimneys teetered, then fell away into the flames.
She swung her gaze back to his face, and when he saw her eyes, he tried to retreat. Her fingers dug in and held him.
“Where would Jonas go?” she demanded.
“What do you mean?”
“His ‘power nexus’—where is it?”
But she knew. Before Bennett opened his mouth, she knew.
“The abbey,” he said. “But how—”
She seized him by the lapels of his striped pajamas and pulled his head down until his face was almost touching hers, all the fury and fear of the last weeks lying naked in her face. “If you go there, if you so much as stir from this place, I will rip off your balls and feed them to you.”
She saw her string of brutal monosyllables hit home, saw the fear in his eyes telling her that he did not doubt that she was perfectly capable of carrying out her threat. Then she turned and ran, stumbling in the uncertain light and cursing the branches and thorns that caught at her, plucking at her clothes, tearing her skin and slowing her down. Away from the glare of the fire, the sky was growing light, and when she fought her way out of the woods and into the abbey clearing, the day was already there.
So were Jason and Dulcie. They were not alone.
Anne stood, gasping for breath and fighting for calm with streams of black ash and bloodred sweat running down her face, her once-light-gray running pants filthy and torn, her heart pounding from exertion. Seeing Jonas seated on the altar stone, one distant corner of her mind abruptly knew, with the sure revelation of a light going on, that Samantha Dooley had never left Change, that she had given her life to Jonas Seraph’s search for Transformation, that her remains now lay beneath the stone that Jonas had patted so affectionately when he first showed his new partner this place.
She was barely aware of the knowledge. The whole of her vision was taken over by the sight of Jonas Seraph, sitting on the newly settled stone, a shotgun resting across his folded knees, its barrels pointed directly to where Jason sat, half turned away from Jonas, his arms wrapped protectively around Dulcie. Anne walked forward slowly, and Jonas saw her.
“You are late!” he shouted furiously. “The fire must be nearly out—I called for you an hour ago.”
Anne tore her eyes away from the two frozen children, and continued up the grassy aisle toward Jonas with her hands out at her sides, fingers splayed and palms down in the gesture of peace.
“I’m here now, Jonas, so you can let the children go.”
He did not seem to be listening; instead, he had begun to stare at her with what looked like reverence. “My vision,” he breathed. “A woman in white with the sweat of many colors on her face, giving birth to the golden-haired man.”
“Let the children go, Jonas,” she repeated. “They’ll just be in the way.”
His focus shifted to her face. “Innocence is needed.”
“Two are needed, not four. I am the innocent here, and all the sacrifice you need.”
“I don’t…” he wavered.
Anne took another step forward, talking calmly. “Jonas, the fire is past its peak. You must have the female for your male, the moon for your sun, the mercury for your sulfur. You need me, Jonas. Now or never.”
She reached down for the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head. She wore nothing underneath it but the lumpy buckskin medicine pouch between her breasts.
She kicked off her shoes and moved across the cool grass to stand directly in front of Jonas. Without hesitating, she shoved her thumbs into the waistband of her sweatpants, peeled them off, and dropped them onto the turf. Turning her head slightly to meet Jason’s astonished eyes, she said, “Take Dulcie and run,” and then she threw herself at Jonas.
Anne’s final awareness was of gratitude. Jason ran, with Dulcie in his arms: It was not all in vain.
7.
TRANSFORMATIO
transform (vb) to change in
composition or structure; to
change in character or
condition; cf. CONVERT.
Procede we now to the Chapter of Exaltacion,
Of whych truly thou must have knowledge pure.
For when the Cold hath overcome the Heat,
Then into Water the Air shall turned be,
And so two contraries together shall meet,
Till either with other right well agree.
CHAPTER 32
From FBI documents relating to the Change case, Somerset
compound. Evidence photograph showing sketchbook
belonging to Jason Delgado.
At eight-thirty on that May morning the sun had been up for hours, slanting across the hills and fields of southern England, dispelling the dew from the rich grass and the flourishing hedgerows. The air was still, the leaves motionless, and neighboring farmers in their fields and barns only now began to pause and sniff the air, wondering if the slow-moving haze in the air might not be connected to those distant sirens that had awakened them during the night.
The trees around the brick shell that had been a Victorian manor house were scorch
ed and withered from the heat. Those farther away were no longer green but gray, laden down with the dirty snow of ash. The air was heavy with the stink of burning things, timber and foam rubber, plastics and fuel oil, leather and flesh—although whether the flesh was human, animal, or both would not be known for many hours. And now a great number of combustion engines made their contribution, spewing fumes into the sweet May morning, all the petrol and diesel motors that had first trickled, then surged into Change as soon as the camouflaged guards had stood down. Police and fire personnel, ambulances and emergency communication vans, NCIS investigators with Social Services hard on their tail, and the media left slavering at the gates to snatch photographs through the windows of the departing ambulances.
At eight-thirty on that magnificent spring morning, two more children came stumbling out of the woods. The boy wore a pair of running shorts, a once-white T-shirt, and one high-topped athletic shoe; the small girl had on a long flannel nightgown, filthy and torn, and her black hair was a wild mat of leaves and twigs. Both were shocked and footsore, badly scratched and caked in mud from their long, circuitous battle through the English jungle. They stopped at the edge of the clear ground, gaping at the incomprehensible sight before them. The girl whimpered, and the boy gathered her up into his arms and stood for a minute, studying the strangers.
Jason knew a cop when he saw one, even an English cop wearing a tweed suit, and although this was the first time in his life he had actually sought a policeman out, once he had chosen his man he did not hesitate. He adjusted Dulcie’s weight in his aching arms and carried her up the drive toward the man, waiting at the tweed elbow until the man finished giving instructions to a pair of uniformed police constables.