A Darker Place (22 page)

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

From the beginning, when Anne Waverly had first opened Glen McCarthy’s manila envelope, she had been struck by just how much of an anomaly the school at Change was; now, seeing it in action, it puzzled her even more. In Ana’s considerable experience, religious communities tended to regard the education of their children as the touchiest area in their belief system. The single biggest perceived threat to the community’s future and purity was usually the interference of governmental agencies of various stripes in how it chose to raise and educate the next generation of believers.

The same touchiness, of course, applied to the opposition as well: Governmental agencies and the general populace will shrug their collective shoulders at the oddities practiced by adults, even when they have to raise their collective eyebrows. A belief in aliens, strange meditative practices, even a bit of discreet drug use are not enough to bring an official hand down on the community’s shoulder, but start interfering with the innocent, especially with young children, and hell will break loose. Literally. Most of the truly disastrous confrontations with “cults” have been sparked by the perceived (if often groundless) maltreatment of children.

However, Change was different. Here, not only their own children, but some thirty outsiders in addition attracted the attention of the school boards and Child Protective Services, the welfare, social security, income tax, and housing agencies, the courts and probation officers, and a dozen other suspicious bureaucratic entities eager to lay hands on this cult in the desert, to say nothing of
the parents and relatives of the children who had been taken from their tender care.

All of those busybodies were welcomed. Not just borne as a necessary evil, but actively welcomed, greeted with smiles and treated as co-workers in the task of raising children. Books were laid open, problems freely admitted and discussed, suggestions welcomed.

The school, Ana knew, did represent a sizable income for the community. Once the state had been convinced that here was a group willing and able to assume the burden of some of the system’s incorrigibles, it had tentatively given Change a grant. When results began to appear, when a handful of hardened young troublemakers were tugged free of the cycle that normally led to the prison door, the money came more freely. And after a particularly noteworthy triumph involving a gangbanger who had lived at Change for two years and then been accepted at U.C. San Diego, the name of Change was heard on the lips of state senators and money was increasingly found, even from the private sector: The hardwood floor in the dining hall had been given by a chain of sporting goods stores based in Phoenix, a computer company donated machines and software, a new roof was provided by a local contractor looking for a tax writeoff.

All of which explained why the Change members should appear to welcome inspectors and pen pushers, but not why they should actually do so. Ana found it puzzling.

It was, oddly, the reticent Teresa who gave Ana what she later found to be an important clue to understanding Change doctrine.

Except in the classroom, Teresa was almost pathologically silent. In front of her kids she was quiet, although she had a considerable talent for dropping a brief
phrase that set the students into action or brought them into line, depending on the need at any given time.

Teresa was the widow of a drunken and abusive husband who killed himself and three others when his truck drifted over the centerline straight into a family that was on its way home from a niece’s
quinceañera
celebration. Two months after the accident, Teresa, who when her husband was alive had ventured out only to shop and make the rare visit home to her mother and now was almost completely withdrawn into her house, happened to see a program on the local cable television channel about Steven Change and his community.

She wrote him a long, agonized letter. Three days later Steven was on her doorstep, coaxing her out, bringing her back to life.

Ana learned all this from Dominique, who liked to talk while she was involved in meaningless tasks such as filing or folding brochures for mailing. Ana decided it might be a good idea to listen carefully to whatever utterance Teresa might care to make. As with Dulcie, words issued sparingly were intended to count.

Teresa’s clue came after Ana had been involved in a particularly harrying telephone roundabout, an attempt to find someone who could tell her where the father of one of the Change foster kids could be found, after the boy had said in a revealingly offhand manner that he wouldn’t mind if his dad happened to visit for the boy’s birthday the following week.

With forty minutes of argument, cutoffs, and being kept on hold behind her, Ana slammed the receiver down and grabbed at her barely grabbable hair.

“God!” she exclaimed. “Don’t they
want
these kids to get their lives together? I don’t know how you guys do it, day after day of keeping your patience with the bureaucrats.” Teresa was typing fourteen reports for the
sheriff’s department; Dominique was writing letters to parole officers across the state.

“Steven says, ‘The most blessed thing you can swallow is your own spittle,’” Dominique commented sympathetically, although he did not seem to have mentioned that he was quoting the Prophet, Ana noted.

Teresa added, “Heat and pressure are necessary to the transformation process.”

“Does Steven say that, too?” Ana asked. Teresa nodded. “Then it must be true,” Ana said grimly, and reached again for the telephone.

During the day she caught three glimpses of the child who could have been her daughter. The first was through the open door of the kindergarten room, where Dulcie sat on a tiny wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap and her hair in two thick, short, lopsided braids, while the teacher read her class a story. Two hours later, she again saw Dulcie, sitting on a boulder in the open desert garden between the compound buildings, waiting patiently. When the main door of the school building opened, the child jumped to her feet in anticipation, and when Jason appeared she ran to him—and then dropped in at his side and reached out a hand for his, almost shyly. He rumpled her hair and tweaked one stubby braid, and casually tugged her over so that they walked along with her shoulder bumping against his hip, heading to the dining hall for an after-school snack. And then later still Ana spotted them a last time, on their way toward bed. Dulcie was up in her brother’s arms, limp and looking not far from sleep. Jason’s proud head was bent, ever so slightly, to fit over hers. It was a gesture Ana could feel in her own neck, the warmth of two bodies reaching out to each other, and she was smiling as she entered the meditation hall.

Inside the hall a number of the formerly empty platforms were now occupied by the Change members returned
from England. Ana saw with interest that Steven sat, not on the highest platform, but the second highest. Below him was a man whose muscular body and scowling brows contrasted oddly with a weak mouth that his aggressive mustache could not quite hide. This must be Thomas Mallory, longtime friend of Steven Change, second in command, and occasional dealer in illegal firearms. He looked the sort of small man whose touchiness over his size drove him to pump iron and collect guns; a man who thought of himself as dangerous, and might actually be if he was pushed too far. She studied him for a minute, but found her eyes drawn to the empty space at Steven’s right. If the highest place was not Steven’s, whose was it? Or was its emptiness permanent and symbolic—a place set at the table for God?

Steven rose smoothly and strode across the narrow walkway to the high platform beneath the golden cloud. He folded himself into a lotus position, took a few deep and slowly exhaled breaths, and opened the evening’s session of meditation with a brief but carefully worded sermon on the necessity of discomfort on the road to Transformation. He then gave them the mantra, “Great heat, great change.”

They chanted for a while and then came silent meditation, and Ana’s mind wandered back from Steven’s words to the earlier statement by Teresa, and beyond that to the things he had told her walking back from the red rocks. He had spoken of being put through the tempering fires during the search for enlightenment—what he called Transformation—but she had taken it for a metaphorical reference to inner struggles. If his community interpreted this as a command that they should welcome the pressures and irritations of meddling outsiders because they helped to build character, it explained a great deal. Surely the hair shirts of the early Christian monks, their fondness for mortification of the flesh and embracing
of bodily torments and martyrdoms might find modern psychological equivalents in automated telephone systems and the barbs and torments of red tape?

It was actually quite funny, once she thought about it.

Teresa had not thought it amusing, though. Ana began to wonder what other forms of heat and pressure might be applied in the search for Transformation. This was not, all in all, a comforting thought. Nor very amusing.

What else had Steven said, according to Teresa? It was something about the arduous building project. “Sweat meditation,” she had called it.

Come to think of it, that had an uncomfortable sound to it as well.

The days passed, five of them, during which Ana saw Dulcie half a dozen times and Jason up close twice and three times at a distance, in the school or walking across the compound, and once she saw him setting out on a morning run. Steven she saw any number of times, but of the three, the only one she exchanged words with was Dulcie.

She lived in the community and she worked alongside the others, but Ana could feel that she was not a fully accepted member. She remained an assistant in the classrooms, people gave slight hesitations before some answers, as if considering her status, and polite demurrals when she offered to help with some project or other.

This clear sense of boundaries indicated a degree of suspicion that Ana could not afford to let stand, but she knew that not until Steven gave the word would she begin to be integrated into the Change community.

She knew why he was withholding his blessing, too. He had accused her at their early-morning interview of a lack of commitment, of flightiness and an unwillingness
to dig in, and she had not denied it. He would be waiting for her to ask him for the next stage in her Transformation.

Very well, she would ask. But not tonight. Tomorrow she would give her pledge to commit herself to Change—or, rather, give the nonexistent Ana’s meaningless pledge. Tonight, though, was hers—not to drive into Sedona and gorge on meat and wine, not even if Steven hadn’t already spoiled that pleasure. No, tonight she would take a solitary walk, playing hooky from the group meditation and wandering by herself through the near-empty compound
.

The moon lay on the horizon, past full now but still large and heavy with gathered light. The night was cold and cloudless, the white stones lining the edges of the path luminous in the light. Ana left her flashlight in her pocket and wandered the compound by moonlight and the lights from the windows.

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
.