A Darker Place (53 page)

To Anne’s relief, Dulcie went with neither protest nor question, swept up in Sara’s energetic program. The child was as safe as Anne could make her for the next few hours. Now for her brother.

Anne loaded up a tray of dishes. Deirdre was on kitchen duty this morning, and after Anne had deposited her contribution in the lineup to the right of the sink and exchanged a few cheerful phrases about the never-ending nature of washing-up, their mutual preference for bean-free clothing, and the beauty of the morning, she left Deirdre and the others to their labors.

At the door she paused, hovering on the edge of saying something, of issuing a vague warning, or at least of urging Deirdre to take herself down to the bean field with Sara for the day, anything but staying in this brick monstrosity where anything might happen. Deirdre glanced up and frowned vaguely at her, and the words died on her lips. What was there to say, after all? I’m going to go and bait the bear in his den, perhaps? Or, I plan to go help Jason with his Work, so beware the explosion from the laboratory? She turned and left the kitchen.

Outside the insignificant door that led to Jonas’s subterranean world (and, she prayed, Jason Delgado), Anne knelt to tie her shoelace four or five times until the hallway was clear of people. When she was alone, she stepped quickly forward, wrenched open the door, and closed it behind her as silently as she could.

The landing and the stairway it gave onto were as cramped and unadorned as they had been when the Victorian builder had created them for the use of the servants.
The only essential change was the string of bare electrical bulbs where once a solitary gas flame would have hissed and sputtered.

Anne stood still, on the threshold dividing two worlds. Outside the door were voices and movement, the rattle of dishes in the kitchen and a snatch of song. She heard a vacuum cleaner start up in a distant room, and a woman’s voice asking Cali if she thought the flour would last until Tuesday. From below came nothing. Silence crept up the stairway, as palpable as the odor of damp stone.

Anne was a woman well accustomed to the textures of silence. She lived alone in a house with no neighbors and she rarely listened to recorded music or the television set. She knew silences that were uncomfortable, or pointed, or suggestive, but silence for her was generally more a matter of potential than of absence.

The silence coming up the stairs at her was the same silence she had felt out in the jungle with Jonas, thick and alive and with a distinct trace of malevolence. A person from Sedona might declare that bad things had happened here, to disturb the building’s aura. A Victorian might say there was a ghost. Anne knew it to be a projection from her own mind onto the blank screen of the disappearing staircase, but it hardly mattered; they all amounted to the same thing.

She started down the stairway, leaving the upstairs noises behind.

The stone of the walls was dry and cool, and whispers from her clothing ran up and down the stairwell. The ceiling seemed to become lower as she approached the bottom, although she could not be certain that it was not just an intrusion of her nightmare.

At the bottom, she was again faced with the three
blank doors with their sturdy locks, the damp tiles of the floor, and behind her, Jonas’s lair. The only sounds were from upstairs, and even those were more the sense of movement than actual noises. It was a sturdy building. Anne stepped softly around the stairs to Jonas’s room, and found that, too, empty of life. She was alone, with the outside world there at the touch of an electronic finger. She would not get a second chance.

The whine the computer made when she switched it on seemed loud enough to be heard in the kitchen, and the click of the scanner was not far behind. She looked at the door as if expecting Jonas to lumber through with his paws outstretched, then took a deep breath and committed herself.

She called up the computer’s e-mail program without opening up the line, and with excruciating slowness transferred the written journal pages from the sole of her shoe into the electronic file, laying two pages at a time on the scanner’s glass screen. She wished she had written smaller, wished Jonas had updated his hardware in the last two years and gone for speed, even wished she had rallied her students on that long-ago afternoon in the lecture hall and let them throw Glen out the doors.

Her polo shirt was wet by the time the last page had been read, and she rapidly created an attachment of the scanned pages, typed in Uncle Abner’s e-mail address, and hit the
SEND
button. The screen blinked and it was gone.

She then had to remove it from the records, so Jonas wouldn’t happen across this curious document, a process that took more time on this unfamiliar setup than sending it had. At last she had to assume it was as deleted as she could make it. She turned off both machines, checked again to be sure she had not forgotten any sheets of paper on the scanner, rolled the pages back up, and
feverishly stuffed them back into her shoe, which she then jammed onto her foot and tied.

She dropped into Jonas’s big leather chair and stared at the dark screen in astonishment. She had actually done it. God, how rare it was, the sense of completion that hitting the
SEND
bar had given her. She could not know that Glen would be too preoccupied to check the Abner e-mail until it was too late to make a difference, but that did not matter. She had done her job, she had finally fulfilled her duty to Glen. That small movement of her finger had somehow cleared all past debts. She was free to deal on her own with the problem of a courageous, loyal, great-hearted, quixotic boy too old for his years who had, she knew in her bones, submitted for the second time to the alembic of a Change leader. Glen would never approve, but she no longer belonged to Glen. Now her only responsibility was to Jason Delgado and his curly-headed sister.

She scooted the chair back a few inches and began to open the desk drawers, looking for keys. The locks on the three doors outside Jonas’s study were all new enough to retain their brass shine, and she thought it highly unlikely that an amateur like her could pick all three without being discovered. She didn’t even know if English locks differed from the American brands she had learned on. She had a brief image of herself reduced to battering down the doors with a fire ax, and shook her head. Another thing Glen had left her unprepared for.

Instead, she searched for a key. Possibly a set of keys, but since all three locks looked identical from the outside, there was a good chance Jonas would have asked for one key rather than fumbling to choose the right one.

In the bottom left drawer she found a wooden cigar box containing a rich cache of keys; unfortunately, most of them were of the long-shanked skeleton type gone black with age, obviously original to the building. There
were half a dozen newer keys, but when she went to look at the doors, none of the keys matched the brand names on the locks. She pulled out two or three likely candidates, but none of them fit.

They were all labeled, cardboard circles with metal edges tied on with loops of string, but the words written down bore no resemblance to locations. The one in her hand, for example, had a Greek phrase written in a neat hand that she thought might be that of Jonas Seraph. She puzzled over it for a moment and decided it said, “All men have one entrance into life,” which she thought was from the Apocrypha—given the language, probably from the
Wisdom of Solomon
. Then she realized what the key was for: the front door. A similar key bore simply the word “anus,” which seemed peculiar until she came up with its euphemism of “back passage”: This would be the key to the outside door near the kitchen. Jonas had his own sense of humor, inconvenient and juvenile, but clever.

She put the keys back and closed the desk drawer on them. It was, of course, all too possible that he had only one key and he kept it with him at all times, in which case this entire enterprise was about to trickle off into farce. Still, she was not finished yet. She pushed herself away from the desk, returning the chair to its original position, and turned to the shelves.

A painstaking half-circuit of the room, beginning with the door and working her way along the left side of the room, left her with filthy hands, a heightened respect for the man’s depth of scholarship, and no key. She sorted through the wild assortment of objects covering the windows—the only windows in this level of the house, she had discovered—but there was no key, even though it would have been his style. She did find, hanging among the display of dry bones that covered the third window, a silver necklace, a worn lump of silver
similar to the golden shape Steven wore, only slightly elongated and curved inward at the ends. It looked, actually, a bit like a crescent moon, and she thumbed it, wondering briefly whose Work this had been, before her growing apprehension and sense of time running out drove her back to the room’s entrance to start the sweep of the other half of the room.

Three shelves down from the top, at fingertip reach for a man of six feet four but needing a ladder for her, a title jumped out at her: Mary Baker Eddy’s book that formed the basis for Christian Science interpretation of the Bible. Its name was
The Key to the Scriptures
, and Anne knew instantly why it was there among a group of geology textbooks. She carried over the library ladder, pulled down the book, and opened it at the red ribbon: a key.

She slid the book back, put the ladder away, and took the beribboned key into the hallway. The house had fallen silent above her, which meant only that it was not yet time to begin the preparations for lunch. No time to waste.

She began with the left-hand door. The key turned, but the door did not open. Her heart sank, then speeded up. If her key did not open it, that was not because it did not work; there must be another lock, turned from the inside. Someone was behind this door. Very gently, she rotated the key the other way to remove it, and when she withdrew her hand from the knob, it turned, and the door came open. She stumbled backward, and then felt like smacking herself on the forehead: The door had been unlocked to begin with.

Looking inside, she could see why. This was Jonas’s private rest room, and the only reason he might lock it at all was the extensive collection of oversized books on erotica that took up most of one wall. She closed the door
and tried the other two knobs. Both of those were locked.

The right-hand door proved to be a closet, with nothing more exciting than an elderly computer sitting among the reams of paper and printer cartridges. She locked the door without even entering the small room, and turned to the middle door, where she found a web of scratches around the keyhole. The key turned, the door opened, she put her head inside, and for the first time she heard noises—a slow, rhythmic thump punctuated by the indistinguishable rumble of male voices. She contemplated the sounds for a minute, and then she withdrew her head, went back to the study, and replaced the key inside Mary Baker Eddy. This time when she came out she walked directly over to the middle door and went through; closing it behind her but not turning the latch. I found it open, Jonas, she would say innocently. You must have forgotten to lock it, she would add with a blink of her big blue eyes.

She was in a dim subterranean passage, stone walls again to support the brick structure above. It was long and straight, its only features the doors that faced each other every ten feet or so, most of which were heavy, old, and locked. Two of them were massive, strapped with bolted iron and set with elaborate black locks that looked considerably more ancient than the building over her head. Arnold Schwarzenegger might be able to pick those mechanisms, but Anne hoped she wouldn’t be called on to try.

The rhythmic noise increased as she walked down the passageway. A stone barrier blocked the end, but when she reached it she found not another pair of doors, but a T-junction, with the passageway splitting at right angles in either direction. She had chosen the left both in the study and then with the three doors, neither of which had been very helpful, but she decided to give the direction
one more chance, and walked softly down the narrow corridor to the left toward the sound of machinery, the steady hiss of air, and the ever-clearer voices.

The stone walls went for thirty feet and then took another ninety-degree turn, this time to the right. The sound of her rubber-soled shoes on the grit was lost now, and she could hear, unmistakably, the deep voice of Jonas Seraph in an uninterrupted monologue. The walls turned another corner to the right, but she seemed to be nearly on top of the sounds, so instead of stepping out into whatever space lay beyond, she knelt, putting herself below eye level, and peered around the wall.

Opposite her, perhaps fifty feet away, a stone archway opened up—the right-hand half of the split corridor, which together with the one she had followed formed a squared Y around the central room. The wall between her and the archway had two doors, both shut. She eased herself forward, more and more of the room coming into view, until she saw a man seated on a high stool, his back to her. It looked like Marc Bennett; he seemed to be just sitting and gazing at something on a long, heavy, beat-up workbench. If she had chosen the right-hand passage, he would now be looking straight at her.

Keeping her body well back from the room’s line of sight, she edged her gaze farther out into the room. Next she saw Jonas himself, also on a stool and directly facing her, although what she had thought to be monologue was actually him reading aloud from a heavy volume in archaic English on the Peacock stage of the alchemical process, and he did not look up. His voice rose and fell, infusing the nonsense with considerably more drama and meaning than it possessed.

The hiss and thump continued without faltering, and Anne braced herself for what else the room would contain. She was soon looking clear to the end wall, but what she saw was not a metallic pear-shaped object the
height of a tall man emitting muffled cries of distress, but a small brick furnace topped by a pear-shaped glass object, the flames blown white-hot by a large bellows worked by Jason Delgado, stripped to the waist, with sweat coming off his back in runnels and his hair down in his face. His back muscles bunched and moved, and she could tell at a glance that every part of him burned with tiredness, yet his left arm kept a steady beat with the bellows handle. His right hand came up and dashed the sweat from his eyes, and then he shifted his position and transferred the handle over to his other hand.