Authors: Laurie R. King
A Darker Place (40 page)
“I’m not going to lie to you: You will not be comfortable here. You will work hard. You will sweat and strain and come to hate us all, but you will stay because you will be able to see and feel the results of your Work. Some of you will stay,” he added, and again his gaze touched Ana. She couldn’t think what she had done to offend him, unless if, as she had come to suspect, there was rivalry between the two men, and Steven’s approval alone had condemned her in Bennett’s eyes. Ah, well—all the better if she could turn his disapproving gaze from Steven’s other protégé, the teenager at her side. Even if Bennett was not the community’s leader, he could make life difficult for Jason.
“I have nothing to say at the moment about the deeper implications of your life here. It is up to Jonas to set each of you on his or her Work, and tell you what you need to know. Jonas will speak to each of you alone
over the next few days. If he thinks you belong here, you will stay; if not, you’ll be going back to Arizona.
“In the meantime, let’s talk about rules. Our pressures here are very intense, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise to find that our regulations have to be tighter. It goes without saying that the same basic ground rules you had in Arizona apply—no drugs or drink, no music or distracting clothes, no personal possessions you’re not willing to share, and absolutely no unauthorized jewelry. Beyond that, we have three requirements.
“One: Everybody works. If you’re not carrying your weight, you go back.
“Two: No outside contact unless it’s absolutely unavoidable, particularly in your first eight weeks here. In Arizona you welcomed outsiders, you came and went, you used the phone and wrote letters home, because you were at an early stage in your Work, where it didn’t matter. Here we are higher. Because things are more concentrated, more delicate, outside interference can have terrible consequences. We have wrapped this estate around us to allow us to work undisturbed; none of us can endanger the whole by coming and going without supervision.
“Be aware, too, that the authorities are harassing us—issuing us writs, plaguing us with financial inquiries, and just plain watching us. Some of you saw the panda car parked in the road, but they’re a load more high tech when they want to be. Just assume that they’re watching overhead at all times, and keep under cover whenever you can. When you’re working in the fields, wear one of the hats we keep in the garden shed so they can’t see your face. And never go near the boundaries—they have cameras.”
Ana found that she was standing with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She wished Benjamin had not deserted her. She wished she were holding Dulcie.
Most of all she wished she knew what the hell was going on. Why, for one thing, was Marc Bennett standing there pontificating? Where was Jonas Seraph? Both Steven and Glen had led her to believe that Jonas was in charge here, and Bennett’s words had indicated that Jonas was present. Was he ill, and capable only of limited, individual interaction with the new members of Change?
Whatever the explanation, she did not like this at all. Forty minutes earlier she had been laughing in quiet pleasure at the gamboling lambs and the kittens, and suddenly here she was, listening to a speech about the terrible threats of the outside world that could have come from the mouth of any of a hundred mentally unstable leaders whose names went on to make the headlines. Cameras and spy planes? The abruptness of the change was shocking, as if she’d been dropped into an icy lake. She began to feel dizzy. Bennett went inexorably on.
“And rule three: You’re newbies. Assume that anybody here knows more than you, do what they tell you, and you won’t get in trouble. Once Jonas has approved you, you’re going to work long hours, you won’t get much sleep, and the only time you’ll sit down is to eat or to meditate. Or in school,” he added in afterthought with a glance at Jason. “And God help you if you fall asleep during meditation, because Jonas sure won’t.”
By this time Dulcie was up in Jason’s arms, hiding from her tiredness and confusion and the strange man’s big voice. She cringed at his gust of laughter and turned a wary eye on him, but Jason was listening to Bennett with no small interest, and merely patted her absently.
“So,” Bennett said. “There’re the three main rules: work, apartness, and obedience. If you don’t like it, tell us by lunchtime tomorrow, and we’ll send you back to Arizona, nothing lost but a return ticket and a couple of days. Look around, talk to people, stay out of sight, and make up your mind. Steven sent you because he thought
you needed the greater heat here to help your Transformation. If he was wrong, it’s his fault, not yours.” The prospect of Steven’s being wrong obviously pleased him. “Any questions?”
Questions? thought Ana. By God, she had questions, but they were hardly the sort Bennett would answer for her. Why hadn’t she been warned? Oh yes, she’d been told that there were guns in the Los Angeles branch of Change and that a boy had been killed in Yokohama. But why had Glen neglected to mention the little fact that the English group was an armed camp run by a drill sergeant who saw camera lenses in the birds’ nests? Damn you, Glen, she raged, though her face remained stiff and unrevealing.
She held the anger tightly, and fed it with the sight and sound of Marc Bennett and the thought of the flaying she would give Glen when she saw him next, and the anger was a relief and a bulwark against what lay beneath, trying to break through.
For underneath lay dread, the chill, memory-laden fear of the inevitable, composed of images: Abby lying wrapped in Aaron’s swollen arms on the hard-baked Texas earth; Calvin Vester in Utah, a friendly man who had cooked her breakfast, seen in Rocinante’s side mirror with his gun coming up; Martin Cranmer with the Kansas wheat fields stretching out behind him, brutally knocking one of his followers to the ground, laughing. She could almost smell the burnt-steam stink of the ruptured radiator mixed with the hard, hot smell of her own blood; above all she felt the clear sensation of being trapped in a room filled with flammable gas and the only way out involving a lighted match—staying was unthinkable, leaving impossible. It was Texas, driving away from Abby and Aaron, only Texas with the foreknowledge of what her action would lead to.
Bennett ran out of words, nodded brusquely, and left
the room, but Ana stood paralyzed and unseeing as the meeting broke up and people began to lead the newcomers and their possessions away. She watched Jason and Dulcie leave without a backward glance, and only gradually became aware of the plump, ordinary, sane-looking forty-year-old woman who was standing patiently in front of her.
“Hello?” The woman’s humorous, questioning intonation indicated that she had greeted Ana several times already. This time she saw Ana focus on her, and she smiled. “Hi. I’m Sara. Shall I show you where your room is?”
“Sorry,” Ana said. Her mouth felt numb, her voice not her own. She tried a return smile, apparently with success. “I was miles away. That would be good of you, thanks.”
Sara picked up one of Ana’s two bags and started briskly for the stairway, chattering in an enchanting English drawl about how “disorientated” jet lag left a person, and then about the weather. Ana followed slowly, only half hearing.
Don’t overreact, she was telling herself; this is neither Utah nor Texas. You’ve spent weeks in the Arizona community and seen no signs of problems, and then you come here and take the rude gesture of one anti-authoritarian driver and the speech of a self-important member—not even the group leader—put them together, and build a toppling tower.
Calm down, woman. This is not Texas; this is not Utah. They’ll ship you back to Arizona whenever you want, and there are certainly no jugs of poison waiting in the cellar; no one is about to run out with an automatic pistol to stop you from driving away. Just think of it as a brief enlistment with the English army.
The surface of her mind began to clear, so that by the top of the second flight of stairs she was paying attention
to what her guide was saying about the recent spate of long, dry summers and the mixed feelings the entire country had about warmth in May.
Ana responded with a comment about how amazing the eyes found the rich green foliage that they had come through compared with the sparse, dry landscape, even in the rush of spring that they had driven through on their way to the airport in Phoenix. They talked while Sara marched her up to a small, cold, north-facing room with ill-fitting curtains and a lumpy mattress, showed her the bath, toilet, and linen room, and helped her make up the bed (Sara’s half had tight, sharp corners) before leading her back down the stairs.
All the while, though, grinding down in the deeper reaches of her mind and repeating over and over was the thought: I should never have let Dulcie and Jason on that plane. Never.
Jonestown began as an attempt to build a paradise in the wilderness, a garden of Eden carved out of the Guyana jungle, populated by multiracial refugees from the oppressive policies of the American system. A thousand people followed the Reverend Jim Jones into the wilderness; within a year, more than nine hundred of them would swallow poisoned fruit drink and lie dead beneath the tropical sun.
However, one cannot explain away the suicide of Jonestown as merely a product of mass delusion and hysteria with a charismatic madman deliberately manipulating his gullible followers. This was a community of well meaning, deeply committed believers who saw the enemy at their gates, about to break in and break them apart. These were men and women willing to take their own lives, and the lives of their beloved children, rather than submit to the contamination of the outside world. When Jewish rebels gave themselves and their children to the knife in first century Masada, theirs became a cry of resolute freedom through the millenia; the followers of Jim Jones will go down as poor deluded losers.
One obvious difference between Jonestown and Masada lies in the degree of actual threat involved. The Romans would indeed have executed some of the rebels and sent the others into brutal slavery; Congressman Ryan and his team were merely investigating, the first bureaucratic trickle in what would have become a deluge. To the minds of the two communities, though, the threat was identical, primarily because the residents of Jonestown were as isolated and pressured as the community over the Dead Sea was 1900 years before.
Isolation and pressure are the two deadliest enemies of any volatile situation. Heat from outside, added to the heat generated from within, and kept under tight pressure by isolation (be it voluntary or enforced) is a sure recipe for disaster. Isolation by itself is a useful tool, if kept sufficiently low key; pressure too can be valuable, if a clear and acceptable (to the community) outlet is provided. Put the two forces together, though, and you have a pressure cooker waiting to explode.
Excerpt from
Religious Communities and the Law: An Alternative
Approach
, by Dr. Anne Waverly (a publication of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation)
But then the next morning Ana woke to the joyful noise of a thousand birds singing their hearts out, and the sound, shouting forth the magnificence of life and hope and normality, blended with the golden light pouring in and brightening the spare furnishings and the stained ceiling, and her heart was glad. Yesterday had been a dark dream plagued by a neurotic fantasy, created by pressures and anxieties and fed by jet lag, her personal history, and an accumulation of sleepless nights. Today she would start afresh, and give herself a chance to see this branch of Change with clear eyes.
Her wristwatch had suffered from the journey, though. Either that or she had made a mistake in setting it to local time, because although it told her that it was not yet five o’clock, her eyes and the birds outside insisted that the morning was well and truly broken.
She dressed and went out into the hallway, where she stopped, puzzled by the complete lack of activity. There were no plumbing noises, no voices from downstairs; surely someone would have mentioned it if Change rose with the dawn? However, when she got to the kitchen and found the only indicator of life to be the fragrance coming from the coffeepot, she took it as a sign that only early risers were about. Actually, if she thought it over, it was a twice-good sign: Here, it seemed, she would be allowed to start the day on something more powerful than a tea bag.
She looked around for a kitchen clock, and was chagrined to discover that no, her watch was not wrong. She had just forgotten how far north England was, how incredibly early it grew light there in the summer.
Well, she was not about to go back to bed, not with fresh coffee at hand and the glories of an English morning outside the door. She tried various cupboard doors until she found a mug, poured herself some coffee and added a splash of rich yellow milk from a glass jug in the refrigerator, and opened the back door.
And nearly whirled around and slammed it behind her, until her mind registered that the pack of baying dogs was not actually going for her.
“Quiet!” she ordered, and then, “Shut up!” A simple “No!” seemed to do more than either of the first commands, so she repeated it sternly until the noise died down to a few growls and whiffles and her heart rate returned to normal. When most of the dogs were quiet, she lowered herself onto the top step and extended her hand for their examination. One or two seemed happy enough to adopt her as their own, two or three stayed well back, eyeing her suspiciously and grumbling to themselves, and the other half-dozen, a motley collection that included a slim boxer very like Livy, sniffed her hand, accepted a pat, and then ignored her.