A Darker Place

  So vivid was Glen’s anticipation that he took two steps into the room before his eyes informed him that the person sitting at the table with a steaming cup of coffee was not Anne. The man looked up, and Glen recognized Eliot Featherstone.

  “There’s coffee,” he told Glen, and went back to the disemboweled toaster in front of him.

  Anne’s toothbrush was missing, thought Glen starkly. He flung himself out the door and into the yard, where he was confronted by the sight of the barn door standing open with no vehicle inside it. Her old Land Rover was parked in its usual place with Eliot’s pickup truck beside it; the Volkswagen bus she called Rocinante was gone.

  Aware suddenly of his lack of shoes, Glen picked his tender-footed way back to the porch, past Stan, who was lying on the edge of the steps with his head between his front paws and his eyes on the empty barn.

  “When did she leave?” he asked Eliot in the kitchen. The younger man stared at him blankly for a minute, processing the question and his answer.

  “Four?” he said finally. “Thereabouts.” He went back to his screws and wires.

  Well, thought Glen, of course she’s gone, that’s what she was going to do. Am I going to get all disappointed that she didn’t wave good-bye?

  He looked bleakly out the window, catching sight of the hatchet in the splitting block, and became aware that his skin was prickling with a tainted sense of uneasiness and reluctance. It felt, in fact, remarkably like the sensation of uncleanness, of needing a shower, a really hot one. He had just taken one, but he was after all in the habit of shaving in the shower, so maybe he would just go back upstairs and drain Anne’s water heater. He reached for a mug to pour himself some coffee, needing strength before he submitted his face to the crappy little pink plastic razors he hoped she still kept in the bathroom, and then he paused on his way out of the room to open the cabinet under the kitchen sink.

  There in the compost bucket, mixed up with coffee grounds and eggshells, lay the thick, wavy mass of Anne Waverly’s hair.

  Anne herself was nearly two hundred miles to the south, walking stiffly back across the parking lot that surrounded a big Denny’s restaurant just off the freeway. She had used their toilet and bought a cup of coffee to go that she did not intend to drink. Instead, she crawled into the back of the bus, tugged the curtains shut, wrapped herself up in the quilt, and slept.

  For once, no one came tapping at the windows ordering her to move on, and she woke hours later, sore all over from Glen’s violent attentions and feeling the black burden of a massive emotional hangover, but at least rested, and ravenous. She swallowed a couple of aspirin with the cold coffee and went back into the restaurant, where this time she ordered a full meal. She drank some of the strong, hot coffee that had hit her cup almost before the seat of her jeans had come to rest on the bright orange vinyl, and then she got up to use their rest room again before her food arrived. When she saw the woman in the mirror, she wished she had stayed in her seat: Her hair looked as if it had gotten in the way of a lawn mower, her lips were swollen, her eyes bloodshot, and her jaws and cheekbones had patches of what looked like angry red sunburn that hurt to the touch—Glen had evidently needed a shave. She splashed a great deal of cold water on her face without looking again in the mirror, and ran her wet fingers through her strangely cropped hair. She’d certainly lost the knack of doing her own haircut.

  She took her time over the meal, and as she paid the bill, she asked the waitress for the nearest no-appointment haircut place. When the woman gave her the information with only the briefest glance at Anne’s head, she earned herself the heftiest tip she’d ever had from a lone woman.

  It was a day for freedom—what remained of the day, anyway. A haircut and shampoo left her with a brief cap of hair hugging her scalp, after which a visit to the Recreational Equipment store she stumbled across entertained her for more than an hour and provided her with a long black metal flashlight, a brilliant yellow fleece pullover manufactured out of recycled soda bottles, two pairs of heavy socks, and a delightful gadget with knife blade, pliers, two kinds of screwdriver heads, and a can opener. She topped off the holiday mood with a night in a motel, where she took first a deep bath and then a hot shower, watched some delightfully inane and utterly incomprehensible television, and slept for eight hours in a bed designed to fit a ménage à quatre.

  The next day it was raining, and she resumed her flight south toward the desert.

  Rocinante chugged her way steadily past the well-fed rivers and rich soil of Oregon, and gamely threw herself at the mountain passes. Laden trucks tended to pass her going uphill, but she made it, and Anne dropped with a sigh of satisfaction down into the disturbingly unnatural green of California’s central valley, where rice paddies grew at the base of desert hills.

  California was even more endless than she remembered, with barely half of it behind her when she finally pulled into a rest stop and allowed Rocinante’s poor overworked engine to fall silent for the night. She made up the bus’s converting bed and lay on it while the trucks and a few cars pounded by on the freeway fifty feet away, setting the crystal mobile over her head to jingling. At two in the morning she gave up and walked over to use the rest area toilets (avoiding looking at the mirror under the harsh fluorescent lights) and then she walked up and down the dark and deserted picnic area for a while before perching on the edge of a splintered wooden table to watch a feral cat teaching her kittens how to raid a waste bin.

  Anne did not know what to think about what she had done the previous night. The sudden elemental up-welling of rage and sheer animal fury frightened her and filled her with self-disgust, that she could be so consumed with the desire to inflict damage on another person, and then by the need to be hurt herself. Her shoulders ached, her wrists and arms were dark with the bruises from Glen’s violent hands, but they were nothing next to the inner turmoil.

  She did not understand her relationship with Glen McCarthy, had never fully understood it. She had long realized that sex with Glen, a man she both liked and loathed, was her way of cutting herself off from her normal self. Sex was invariably a complicated human endeavor—even when monogamous and marital it was the delight of anthropologists and psychologists, and in this case it seemed to have become necessary to complete the transformation of the cerebral and responsible Anne Waverly into the flightier, rootless personalities of Ana Wakefield or Anita Walls or whatever name Glen had picked out for her. Beyond that, however, she was wary to go: too much analysis, too close an understanding, might well make it impossible to participate in the powerful symbolic energy of the act, leaving her unable to cut her ties and walk away from Anne Waverly.

  Now, though, the thing with Glen seemed to have moved from the merely complex to the truly bizarre. It was fortunate, she reflected, that she had already decided to be done with Glen. The next time she might easily find herself going after him with a kitchen knife in her hand.

  It was cold, and easing her stiff knee, she got down from the picnic table to return to the folds of Rocinante’s bed, and perhaps to sleep.

  Still, she thought as she pulled the quilt over her head, she had to admit: It had certainly had its moments….

  Late the next afternoon she finally left the interstate and hit the desert, and began to breathe again.

  She had forgotten how beautiful it was, how bare and clean and disdainful of human beings. Living a life that was divided between a cabin in the tall trees and concrete buildings in the city, Anne was never greatly conscious of the sky, and the sun and moon were things glimpsed and treasured and quickly forgotten.

  Not so in the desert: When the sun was up it was there, unarguably present for all the hours of light, and the division set between the light and the dark was strongly felt. There were no buildings and trees here to filter the daylight and prolong the periods of growing dawn and fading dusk, no city lights to take the edge off the night; just the hot white day and the cold black night, and the brief sly times when one handed over t
o the other.

  All these things Anne had managed to forget, and she was caught out by the rapid fall of night before she could find a good side road down which to park. Instead, she found herself peering forward in Rocinante’s dim headlights; she eventually gave up and pulled into a wide shoulder used by trucks.

  The road was a minor one, and the cars only occasional, heard at a distance and swishing past to fade equally slowly in the other direction. Anne heated up a can of refried beans and wrapped them with some lettuce and tomatoes in a couple of tortillas, and carried her dinner outside with a bottle of beer to sit on one of the old telephone poles that had been laid down to mark the limits of the pullout.

  The night was so still, she could hear the bubbles rising in the bottle from the ground between her feet. She left the second tortilla on the plate because the crunch of teeth on lettuce offended her ears, and because she wanted to listen, and to see, and to breathe.

  She wrapped her arms around herself and raised her face to the stars, tentatively taking stock. Her scalp and the bare nape of her neck felt cold and light without the thick covering of hair. Her many aches were already fading, and she was beginning to accept what she was embarked on, starting to feel better about the whole thing, abandoning her classes and the puppies and haring off after Glen’s community. No, better than acceptance: She was feeling good. Clean and strong, in fact. Reborn.

  With that knowledge, in this place, she could finally admit to herself the deep, hidden reason that her nerves had been stretched to the point of snapping ever since she had seen the contents of Glen’s envelope: the desert itself.

  Since the days of the Hebrew fathers, and no doubt for unrecorded millennia before then, the desert had called out as a place of refuge for the disenfranchised, the oppressed, and the just plain mad. God spoke out in the desert—or perhaps humankind could simply hear the divine voice more clearly in a place clean of the distractions of busy life.

  Anne Waverly had once loved the desert places. They had reached out to her as they had to countless others, men and women who had removed their followers from the temptations and distractions of life in the green places and settled them to grow in the hot, rocky soil of Egypt or Israel or Rajasthan. She had loved the southwestern desert and reveled in its purity and silence, in the harsh simplicity of its choices, and would no doubt never have sought out a cabin in the deep woods had life been good to her.

  Instead, the desert was where Aaron and Abby had died, and where Anne herself had walked so close to her own death. The desert was inextricably linked in her mind with the color of fresh blood and the nauseating smell of putrid meat.

  She knew this. How could she not be aware of the cold feeling in her gut whenever she had to drive through eastern Oregon, or when she was forced to go to Texas or Arizona for research or to give a lecture and fly over all that vast dead land? She loathed the very idea of the desert, and given a choice would never have set foot again outside the rainy Northwest.

  When she had laid eyes on Glen’s aerial photograph of the Change compound in Arizona’s high desert, her stomach had clamped up. It had remained taut, day and night, for the entire time since then, and had begun to loosen only when the dry air had actually hit her face.

  Funny, she thought as she had a thousand times in recent years, how the disastrous case in Utah eight years ago, four weeks of tension and despair that had ended with her getting shot, had faded in her memory. Not only was the shooting itself wiped from her memory, with the hours before only vague and sketchy, but all the rest had illogically and inexorably bonded itself to the original disaster in her life, Texas, becoming a seamless whole. In Anne’s mind, Abby’s death blended in with her own shooting, as if hundreds of miles and the ten intervening years of Anne’s survival counted as nothing in the eyes of catastrophe. The two pains had merged, the Utah community under investigation tended to blur into the Texas Farm that she and Aaron had joined, and the desert had become one place, an environment inextricably linked with terror and pain.

  She had set out fully expecting to spend the coming weeks shouldering the burden of what the desert represented to her, but now that she was actually here on a log with the grit under her boots and the memory-laden smell of the scrub in her nose, the burden was gone.

  The relief was a bestowal of grace she could not have hoped for, so unexpected was it. She felt like weeping with release, or laughing with the sheer joy of living. She did neither; she merely sat with all her skin alive to the night, feeling the cold air waking her up and renewing her.

  A dog barked far away, and a rooster crowed with irritating frequency from somewhere closer. A point of light moved across the heavens, becoming an airplane bound for Los Angeles or Asia. A car grew and whistled past without slowing, and faded, and when the headlights were gone, Anne raised her face to the heavens and saw the moon being born.

  A delicate sliver of bright new moon hung above her in the cloudless expanse of black sky, sharp-edged and brilliant among the hard points of a million stars. A new moon was a good omen, Anne decided—at least, Ana Wakefield was sure to think so. Half-humorously, she lifted her bottle of beer to salute the vision, but before she could put the mouth of the bottle to her lips, to her astonishment the moon dimmed, flickered, and disappeared. From one end up to the other Anne watched the darkness crawl over it and take possession, leaving only a faint light shadow, like the impression that a brief glare makes on the retina. It was difficult not to feel uneasy, impossible not to feel relief when the crescent shape crept back into view. Then it wavered again, and was gone.

  She watched for a quarter of an hour, openmouthed and oblivious to the cold and the cramp in her neck as the delicate crescent first was there, then gone. Eventually, whatever it was coming between the moon and its sun—high mountains on the other side of the world? distant masses of clouds? or just the curvature of the earth itself?—cleared away, and the moon resumed its place in the heavens, eternal and innocent as if it had never given reason to doubt its solidity.

  For a believer in omens this would have been a mighty portent, the infant moon struggling to find the light that gave it definition. Among primitive peoples it would be the basis for myths about moon-eating demons and cause for lengthy political and theological debates, used by opposing sides to prove both divine support and disapproval of some controversial action.

  How would Ana interpret the vision? Anne wondered. A woman who had worked her way through the I Ching (both coins and yarrow sticks), the tarot major and minor, and the consultation of crystals on a string would not take the birth pangs of the moon lightly. Perhaps I should drive over and buy that damned rooster, Anne mused, kill it, and spill its entrails in an attempt to divine the future.

  Oh yes; it was easy enough to recognize an omen. The difficult thing was how to read it.

  3.

  CALCINATIO

  calcine (vb) To heat to a high

  temperature but without fusing

  in order to drive off volatile

  matter or to effect changes.

  Calcination is the purgation of our Stone.

  CHAPTER 7

  From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

  The following morning Anne crossed the border into Arizona, and returned to winter. Working her way south through California, she had seen a concentration of spring akin to the time-lapse film of an opening flower. In the Pacific Northwest the first bulbs had been pushing their determined heads into the cold; by northern California the almond blossoms were out; in the central part of the state the glorious full blush of spring flaunted itself from every apple orchard, every wisteria-draped fence, every front garden, and by the time Anne entered the desert it might have been a Portland summer.

  Not, however, in Arizona. The only sign of burgeoning life Anne could see from the window of the roadside coffee shop where she sat with her hands wrapped around a hot cup of coffee was the spray of flame-colored flowers on the tips of the ocotillo cactus, and even
those had tufts of snow weighting them down.

  For the past half hour she had amused herself with watching snow flurries approach from the west. They began as a dark shadow on the distant rise of the highway, a clearly drawn line that advanced steadily toward her. The thin sunshine would be blotted out and a whirl of thick flakes would pat against the glass for a minute or two before the flurry swept oh by, leaving the road clear but for another dark line moving down the far-off rise.

  Driving conditions were disconcerting but not dangerous, as long as Anne took shelter among those other refugees from the northern winters, the trailers from Idaho and the recreational vehicles with Manitoba plates. They all lined up obediently in the slow lane, nose to tail at three miles above the speed limit while the interstate big rigs thundered past on the outside, sucking at Rocinante and the other frivolous beings with the vacuum of their passing. What had driven Anne to seek the shelter and coffee of the dubious-looking restaurant was not hazard, but comfort: Rocinante’s heater, a vestigial entity at the best of times, seemed to have retreated entirely into the shell behind the back bumper.

  The coffee was stale, but the buckwheat pancakes Anne had ordered with so little confidence turned out to be fresh and fulfilled the requirements of their kind to combine a hearty mealiness with the miraculous ability to absorb more maple syrup than any other substance known to science. The café had even disdained the modern notion of miserly glass jiggers of syrup in favor of the traditional metal flip-top jug, so that the final bites Anne lifted with her fork were as thoroughly saturated as the first had been.