A Darker Place (45 page)

It was no use. The whispering ghosts, of memories continued to paw at her mind and her inner clock showed no signs of turning over and going back to sleep, so in the end she got up, pulled on jeans, a sweatshirt, and the pair of Chinese cloth shoes she wore as house slippers, and walked down the hall to the bathroom. She took care not to flush the toilet, a massive water closet that must have been the latest in sanitation technology when it was installed at the turn of the century but which roared its presence throughout the house when the chain loosed its eight-gallon tank of water.

She went down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor kitchen, turned on a small light over the stove and clicked the switch on the electric kettle, then began sorting through the nearby cupboards for tea bags and edibles.

The electric kettle had come to a boil and turned itself off before Ana had assembled mug, tea bag, and milk, its speed reminding her that Britain functioned on 220 current rather than the American 110. She poured the water over the tea bag, which instantly turned the water so black the milk did not make much headway even when she had fished out the sodden, scalding bag. Tea, too, was stronger here, it would seem.

She found cheese and a packet of something called digestive biscuits, which looked like round graham crackers and turned out to be a good foil for the cheese. She longed to go outside to eat, away from this house of turmoil, where she could breathe the clean, unscented night air and search for the moon, but she thought of the dogs and reluctantly decided not to risk waking the house with their barking a second time.

Instead, she took her mug and her plate and wandered through the downstairs rooms, her way lit by the shafts of cool light from outside. The dining hall was too big and empty to have much appeal for a solitary diner, so she went on, through a corridor, past a sitting room with a dark television set in the corner and on into the main entrance, a marbled expanse of pillars and stairways, shadowed and mysterious. The rustle of her clothing sent whispers crawling off into the reaches overhead. Not a place to crunch and slurp, she decided, and continued her search for a friendly corner.

The dining room/ballroom on the one side of the house was mirrored on the other side by a room of similar size and shape. This one seemed darker despite the bright patches from the windows, because the walls were paneled with wood. It was also the first room in the manor house that did not echo emptily, for the simple reason that the walls held tapestries and the floor had carpets. The change was soothing, but as Ana walked farther in she saw that the soft floor was practical as well: Probably originally a gallery to display the family portraits that the industrialist would have commissioned, this large room was now the Change meditation hall.

Unlike the Arizona version, this room made no attempt at circularity. The far end of the room had a dais with a cushion for the meditation leader and a fireplace at his back—the only similarity she had seen to the Arizona compound, come to think of it. She climbed on the
dais to examine it as best she could in the uneven light, but found it unexceptional, except perhaps for the locked door at the back of the raised area. She wondered if this, too, led down to an alchemical laboratory, but she had no urge to investigate. Not until she knew the community a whole lot better than she did now.

Ana swallowed the last of her tea and patted the remaining crumbs from the plate with a wet fingertip, and when she turned to go her heart lurched at the sight of a dark figure looming in the entrance to the hall. She gave a squeak of surprise, and then said in a voice that betrayed her attempt at control, “Good evening. Or morning.”

“You are aptly named, Ana Wakefield,” came the man’s voice in return. It was a deep, confident, melodious voice, and as the man moved up the hall toward her, she could see that his body matched it. He was a bear of a man, at least six feet four and broad with it, but he moved with absolute silence.

“Jet lag,” she explained as he came closer. “It makes me wake up at strange times and get hungry at weird hours. I hope nobody minds that I helped myself to the cupboards and walked through the house.”

“Why should anyone mind?” he said, close now. “Are you not one of us?”

Moving in and out of the patches of blue light pouring through the windows, she had seen his dark hair and thick, dark beard, and although she could not see him well enough to compare with Glen’s photograph of Jonas Seraph (né Fairweather), she had no doubt of the bear’s identity.

“Are you by any chance Jonas?” she asked.

“‘By any chance,’” he repeated thoughtfully. Ana became aware that she was standing in a shaft of light, although he was at the moment quite invisible in the shadows. She had always been partial to big men; she
even liked them slightly scary—Aaron had possessed a little-seen but ferocious temper, and she had once had a mild flirtation with a huge, scarred ex-convict until good sense got the better of her odd physiological susceptibility to the pheromones given off by dangerous males. Still, this creature approaching was a bit much even for her. She took an involuntary step back, and suppressed an urge to slip back into the dark as he rose up the two steps to the dais and loomed over her. “Yes,” he said. “I am Jonas.”

“You and Steven have a way of appearing in unexpected places,” she told him. “Is that something he learned from you?”

“It is something that comes with Change. A person’s awareness expands.”

I’ll bet, she thought; I wouldn’t be surprised if there are motion detectors hidden in the wainscoting. She nodded in a way to show her interest in the possibilities of Change and waited for him to go on, but he just stood there, a large, dark presence in front of her. She could see nothing of his face, although the band of light that she stood in also fell across his shoulder and upper arm. He was wearing a corduroy shirt, bleached colorless by the outside lights. His shoulders were broad, his arms beefy, and she was beginning to feel very uncomfortable even before he stepped forward and grasped her arms with his strong hands.

She jerked, nearly letting her mug and plate fall to the floor although she herself moved not at all in his hold, and she fought down the urge to struggle. He bent his head to peer into her face, inches away, so close she could smell the coffee on his breath and the faint astringent odor of his bath soap, an incongruous odor at odds with the heavy carnivore smell that the back of her mind had anticipated. She badly wanted to open her mouth and shout at the top of her lungs, rousing the house and
forcing him to let go of her, but the impulse stayed down, even as her head reared away from his, partly because she knew that this was a test of some sort, and in part because she did not feel that he was about to attack her further. Mostly, though, she was afraid that her feeble attempts at self-defense would only make him laugh.

In the end, he let her go—gently, so she did not even stumble back.

“Let me show you what I mean,” he said, and walked away. Mean by what? she thought, confused. After a minute, her heart still racing and her breathing ragged, she followed him.

She found him in the marble entrance foyer, where he had stopped to burrow inside a pair of doors under the stairway. He pulled out two coats, tossing one in Ana’s direction. It reeked of cigarettes and sweat and was far too large for her, but she found a small table to hold her dishes and pulled the coat on. Jonas continued out the front door, where Ana heard a low growl, immediately cut off when her guide—her abductor?—snapped his meaty fingers. When she got to the door she saw three dogs, awakened from their sleep in the shrubbery, coming up to fawn around his legs. One growled when it saw her step onto the porch, and without hesitation Jonas’s hand shot out and delivered a massive slap to the side of the dog’s head that sent the animal spinning. It yelped once and picked itself up from the ground to come groveling back up to them with its tail between its legs, but Jonas had already set off across the weedy gravel drive beneath the harsh lights. The dog did not seem to have reached a state of
satori
, Ana thought wildly as she hurried after Jonas; still, at least its neck wasn’t broken.

They traveled along the drive for perhaps half a mile with Ana in Jonas’s footsteps. It was closer to the ridiculously early English dawn than she had realized, because
when the floodlights faded behind them she could still make out the shape of the ground, the wall of trees pressing on her left, and the rails of a fence on her right.

When they left the road, the stars were fading in the gray firmament overhead, but as soon as she followed Jonas into the narrow gap between the shrubs, she was blind again. She stopped. He firmly gripped her upper arm and began to draw her deeper into the tangle. She held her free hand up in front of her face and allowed herself to be led.

It was the strangest blind walk this child of the Sixties had ever been on. She was being taken into this jungle by a man she would not have trusted with a pot of beans, much less her life, yet even as she placed her bones and flesh in his hands, she felt nothing of the panic that the situation would have justified, nor even much fear beyond a nervous awareness of what her disappearance might mean for Jason and Dulcie.

The surface underfoot was thick with decomposed leaves and small twigs, but blessedly soft for someone wearing thin-soled slippers and nearly smooth—an old road, perhaps, overgrown for decades but as yet not completely overtaken. Jonas seemed to know the way well, because he walked without hesitation, pressing on for at least twenty minutes before he halted and let go of Ana’s arm.

“There’s a bench directly in front of you,” he told her. “Sit down on it and listen for a while, tell me what you hear.”

She patted her way forward to the light shape that turned out to be a very old stone bench, rough with lichen but sound and dry. She sat, and listened. With all her being she listened, and she heard absolutely nothing, not even a breeze stirring the leaves. The silence was weighty, even oppressive; her own breathing was the only sound to brush her ears, and once a tiny twig giving
way beneath Jonas’s weight. Finally, she could bear it no longer. She raised her head and spoke to his dim shape where it squatted a few feet away.

“I can’t hear a thing other than my own breath,” she said loudly. “What did you want me to hear?”

He rose, more twigs crackling under his feet. “Very good,” he said enigmatically. “Now come.”

He plunged off again down the overgrown road, Ana stumbling along helplessly at his heels, and they entered an area that felt more like Lost World or a dinosaur movie than an estate in southern England. Huge fleshy leaves pawed against her face, massive fans that looked like the leaves of rhubarb plants growing downstream from a nuclear power plant. Overhead, lacy fronds clogged the still-dim sky, the prehistoric tendrils of a stand of magnificent tree ferns that any park in New Zealand would have been proud of. In one place in this jungle, even Jonas had to give way, edging around a stand of timber bamboo with stems as thick as Ana’s upper arm. She felt as if she’d been fed through a shrinking mechanism, or a time machine.

And then after about ten minutes they stepped suddenly out from the jungly growth into a sloping stretch of open ground, still indistinct but beginning to take form in the dawn. As soon as they were free of the trees, Jonas dropped to the ground, his bearlike shape fitting as easily into a lotus position as if he were sitting onto a chair. Ana sat down a distance from him and pulled her knees to her chest. Wrapping the borrowed coat around her, she tried to ignore her wet, bruised feet.

There was a faint breeze here, and from somewhere the crisp music of water trickling down stone. The sun was coming quickly now, and details became visible—trees, a small building on the other side of the clearing, a stream winding down the hillside in a delicate curve to the gleam of a pond below. With more light came the
colors, the rich green turf and the yellow of a few late daffodils growing up through it; the pale blossoms, white or pale yellow, of a scattering of shrubs Ana could not identify; the creamy white marble of the little building, its four narrow pillars reminding her of the main house’s entrance foyer and giving it the air of a shrine; the deep, vivid, and unexpected blue of the roof tiles.

And birds, even before full dawn. Distant and tentative at first, then becoming near as others showed themselves and joined in. A far-off rooster contributed its crow, and Ana nearly smiled at the sound.

The chorus grew around them, until all the world rejoiced at the coming of day and the grove rang with life.

Ana felt well and truly out of her depth here. A Marc Bennett she could get around, a Steven Change she could manipulate, but what could she possibly do with a force of nature like the Bear? She hadn’t the faintest idea what they were doing out there, what it was that he expected her to see, how she should react to him. She did know that the method she had used to impress herself on Steven—Ana the enigmatic Seeker who knew more than she realized—would be utterly useless here. Jonas had already, with a few terse sentences, out-enigmaed the Sphinx, and she had no chance to match that. It would just puzzle him.

“Sex is a curious thing, is it not?” Jonas mused, startling her.

After a minute, when no explanation followed, Ana asked a bit uncertainly, “I’m sorry?”

He waved a big hand at the grotto. “Male birds sing to attract females and to proclaim their territory. In primates, the male pounds his chest and the female aligns herself with the most promising male. A woman’s great fear of violation is not only the personal threat, but the fear of the species that her choice might be taken from
her. Just as a man’s great fear, castration, is not only the loss of his own strength, but having his presence in the gene pool taken from him.”

Despite her nervousness, it was very, very tempting to respond to this with a complete non sequitur of her own regarding the Dalai Lama’s teeth or the migration of the monarch butterfly, but she resisted.

“I don’t understand,” she said apologetically.