The Birth of a new moon

"Hola, Dulcinea. Did you enjoy your apple crumble? I helped make it."

The child nodded, and Ana wondered if her former silence was returning, but then she elaborated grudgingly, "It would've been better with ice cream on top."

"I know. Oh well. Hey, I have to go help with the dishes, but afterward I wonder if you'd like me to read you a story?"

Dulcie nodded, animation seeping back into her face.

"Great," Ana said. "How about you come to the kitchen and save me from the dishwashing after you've had your bath and brushed your teeth? Is that okay, Jason?" she said, turning to face him. He looked up at her blankly, having obviously not heard a word she had said before his name.

"What?"

"Can you bring Dulcie down to the kitchen when she's ready for bed and I'll read her a couple of books?"

"Sure. No problem." He went back to his conversation and Ana studied him for a moment. The hardness was leaving his face, dropping years as it went. The tough, sexy street kid she had met was now visible only in the edges of his face and the angle of his head. He had put on a little weight, true, but that was not the only reason that the harsh lines of his face had softened. Unlikely as it might be, here, yanked from his native land and set down among strangers, he had already made friends. Here he was free to be a different person.

Ana looked away before he could catch her staring at him, and smiled a bit sadly at Dulcie.

"See you in a bit, okay, Sancho? Bring me a couple of good books."

Two books translated into four, and after Ana had suggested that Jason come back in twenty minutes or so, they settled down in a comfortable armchair that smelled of dogs in a small room off the kitchen, a space Ana thought might originally have been the butler's domain. Dulcie was warm from her bath and tired from the long day and the time change and the turmoil, and she fell asleep in Ana's arms halfway through a book she had found about a tribe of mice who lived in a church and earned their keep polishing the brasses. Ana finished reading the book silently, then settled back in the chair and was nearly asleep herself when Jason returned for his sister.

"Hey," she greeted him.

"She fell asleep, huh? Thought she might. Sorry,"

"Why be sorry? Sit down. So, what do you think of the place?"

"It's okay,"

Ana grinned at him, and, slowly, he returned it. "I mean, it really is okay. That Bennett guy's a—" He stopped and glanced around guiltily. "You know, he's not real friendly, but some of the kids are pretty cool, and Jonas is great,"

"You've met Jonas?"

"Oh, yeah. I spent most of the afternoon with him,"

"Doing what?" She hoped she didn't sound as startled as she felt.

"Oh, just talking,"

"Talking? About what?"

"Just stuff. My family, how I grew up, the neighborhoods I lived in, things like that,"

(Was that a twinge of jealousy she felt, that Jason should confide so freely to a stranger?)

"You know, it's true," the boy went on with a note of discovery in his voice. "It does help sometimes to talk to people about things. Problems and stuff. It makes things clearer, you know?"

"I know," she said, and bent her head to look at Dulcie and hide the twisted smile she could feel on her lips. (Yes, no doubt about it; it was jealousy.) "Have you noticed that our names are the same?" Jason asked suddenly. "Jason, Jonas—they're just turned around,"

"Did Jonas point that out?"

"Yeah. He has a funny way of looking at things. Original, like. He'll go all quiet for a while and then he'll say something really off the wall. Sometimes I could sort of understand what he meant, but most of the time I really couldn't. I mean, you know how you sort of laugh when someone tells a joke you don't get? Well, I did that a couple of times and I think it kind of pissed him off, because the second time he just stood up and kind of waved his hand like he was brushing me off, and then he walked away.

"I was kind of worried, you know, in case I'd done something wrong, but I asked a couple of people and they said it was no big thing, Jonas was like that. It's like his brain gets full and he has to go think about things for a while,"

"I see,"

Dulcie stirred then, and Jason took her limp body up in his arms and said good night. Ana responded automatically, but for once she was not thinking about them. She was too preoccupied with Jonas Seraph, the distant figure around whom this tense little community turned.

The dynamics of the community were not at all what she had been led to believe, although she had to admit that was because of her own assumptions and expectations, not due to any overt flaw in Glen's information. She had expected Jonas to be dynamic and involved; instead, he was playing the role of the distracted alchemist buried in his thoughts and in his laboratory, and it appeared that Change had been given much of its shape, not by Jonas or even by Steven Change, but by the now-departed Samantha Dooley. Samantha, vanished with her two friends into the women's community in Toronto, where no doubt her intense interest in growing things, in transforming the earth to cabbages and winter soups, was being given free rein. The information on Change had all been there from the beginning, but like an iceberg, the reality changed beneath the surface.

Jonas was beginning to take shape in Ana's mind, this shadowy person defined by the reactions of those around him. Jonas was wise, Jonas was aloof, Jonas occasionally struck those who were being, in his opinion, particularly slow in understanding, although his outbursts of violence were attributed not to any lack of control, but to the teaching methods of a superior being. Jonas did listen to Steven, and he had brought Jason and his sister and baby-sitter Ana all the way from Arizona just to look at the boy, but Jonas could not be bothered to explain his pronouncements to Jason, and had grown quickly impatient with the shy overtures of a fourteen-year-old boy. Ana speculated for a moment about Jason's reactions if Jonas had tried to backhand him into a state of satori, and decided that Jason would almost certainly not have struck back. He was already as much in awe of Jonas as everyone else.

Ana had met any number of people who were as wrapped up in themselves as Jonas seemed to be. Some of them had been profoundly retarded; others were off-the-scale geniuses. Sociopaths were this way, and the severely neurotic, and madmen of various flavors, for that matter—as well as think-tank employees, high-ranking business executives, high-flying academics, half the archbishops she had met, and even, it is true, one or two genuinely holy people. The utter self-absorption of these individuals would have seemed brutal if there had been any awareness in it; as it was, it often seemed only otherwordly. Into which category, she wondered, did Jonas Seraph fit?

The big Victorian house was quiet now, the smaller children abed and group meditation absorbing the adults. Perhaps she might find some hot water in the pipes to soak away the aches.

Ana pried herself up from the soft chair, laid the story about the church mice on the seat, and took herself to bed.

At about the same time that Ana was brushing her teeth and splashing water on her bleary eyes, the diary pages she had mailed at the Phoenix airport landed on Glen's desk. Glen happened to be there, having a tense phone conversation with his fiancee about a dinner party. When he saw the handwriting on the label, he told Lisa that he had to go, hung up on her, and ripped open the envelope.

White faced, he skimmed the final entry and Ana's guarded note to Uncle Abner. Then, more slowly, he read both again. Gone? Ana Wakefield suddenly up and vanished into England's Change compound, out of his reach, his authority, his sight even. What the hell was she thinking of? What kind of an amateur game was she pulling? His phone rang and he reached out automatically to switch on the answering machine, then sat back in his chair and stared out the window at the uninspiring view for several minutes. When he moved again, he looked his age and more. He reached down to open a desk drawer and take out a fat file, worn and dog-eared with age. He leafed through it until he came across a photograph, which he removed and laid on his desk. From another, much newer file on the corner of his desk he took a second photo, a kindergarten portrait of "Dulcie" Delgado taken not long before she and her brother had come to Change. He laid it next to the older picture, which was a duplicate of the snapshot of Abby that Anne Waverly kept in the bottom drawer of her own desk.

The two girls could have been sisters.

He had seen the resemblance before, of course he had. Why, then, had he not stopped to consider the implications? Or had he, and then dismissed them? Anything that made Anne Waverly vulnerable was his responsibility, but the question was—the question that would be asked was—should he have seized on that potential weakness in his operative and immediately upgraded the level of surveillance on her? In other words, was his ass covered?

He had nearly lost her before, eight years ago in Utah. If she had died then, or if her presence in the Utah community had not been so obviously crucial in saving as many lives as it had, Glen's job would have been quietly phased out. He might even have found himself removed from fieldwork. That success, tainted though it was, followed by the clean, almost elegant conclusion of the Cranmer investigation, had left Glen with firm ground beneath his feet, which he had laboriously reinforced during the intervening years until it was nearly as solid as rock.

If anything happened to Anne this time, he would again feel the mud squishing up around his toes. His job was safe—even his enemies would have to admit that if one of his operatives took it into her foolish head to go waltzing out of his sphere of influence and beyond his ability to protect her, it was regrettable, but it could not be construed as his fault.

Which did not mean that he should not move heaven and earth to drag the crazy woman back home. His job might be safe, but his position would not be, and if she failed, the voices behind his back would be poisonous. To say nothing of the reproachful voices inside his own head, telling him that he should somehow have known, and put a watch over the airports, even without the disturbing memorandum that had arrived that same afternoon.

Since his conversation with Ana in Sedona, he had become more and more uncomfortable with the dangling thread that was Samantha Dooley. He had finally sent Rayne up to Toronto again with orders to talk her way inside the women's community where Dooley had taken shelter the previous October. To his great satisfaction, this time Rayne succeeded. His satisfaction was short-lived; Samantha Dooley was not there. She had never been there, and one of the two women who had left Change around the time she disappeared swore to Rayne that the Change founder had not come with them.

No one had seen Samantha Dooley since the middle of October.

Glen pulled forward the Rolodex file that had once been his father's, nipping it open at the H section. There it was: Paul Harrison, National Crime Investigation Service, with two numbers.

He dialed the fifteen digits of the man's private number and sat back, studying the photographs of the two curly-headed girls he held in his free hand while he listened to the double ring of the English phone system.

"Paul? Glen McCarthy here. Sorry to disturb you at home, hope you weren't in bed. Oh, just fine, and you? You heard right—her name's Lisa. Of course she's gorgeous, you know I have great taste. Oh, blonde, of course. And how're those two kids of yours? Great. Yeah, I'd like that—Lisa's never been to England. But look, Paul, I've got a kind of situation here I need some help with. Like, yesterday."

Chapter Twenty-seven

page 3 of 5

Change: I knew you'd like the boy. You don't intend to send him back, then?

Seraph: Of course not. He's wasted there. And the woman. Ana. She's…intriguing.

Change: I thought so. Almost too good to be true.

Seraph: You mean you suspect her?

Change: Suspect her of—Oh, I see. No, of course not. Since when would the police have that kind of imagination? No, I meant she seemed almost too perfect. A born adept, or someone who has spent her life preparing for the work without knowing it. She's got a lot of depth to her.

Seraph: I look forward to plumbing it. I might wish she wasn't so ugly

Change: You think she's ugly?

Seraph: Her hair looks like she's undergone radiation treatment.

Change: I guess. But then you've always been a man for the hair. Remember those two women in Madras? [laughter] She has nice eyes, though, Ana does. How—[pause] How is the other thing coming along?

Seraph: The same. Nothing.

Change: Is there anything I can do?

Seraph: You believe you can succeed where I fail?

Change: Of course not, Jonas. I am only an apprentice, compared to you. We both know that. But if there's any service I can perform as an apprentice, you only have to say

Seraph: I know, Steven. You're a friend. But it's my battle, my work, and I just need to return my mind and soul to a state of balance. Come next month, as you planned. We'll talk then.

Change: Everything else going amoothly? The Social Serices-

Seraph: Not on the phone, Steven. Marc seems to have it all under control.

Change: Marc is an asshole. He's manipulating you.

Seraph: He does Sami's job and lets me concentrate on the work. That's all that matters. You know, Steven, there is one thing you can help me with. There's a book I think you took with

Excerpt from the transcription of a telephone conversation between

Steven Change and Jonas Fairweather (aka Jonas Seraph)

4:46 p.m., GMT, May 21, 199-

Even when she was Anne Waverly, Ana did not have many nightmares. The male psychiatrist assigned to her following the Utah debacle eight years before had found that absence worrying, and kept suggesting that she must be having nightmares and be repressing even the memory of having had them. She had found his attitude unbearably irritating, and soon after that had gone back to Maria, but privately she had to agree: Surely a person who had witnessed as many vile and unnerving sights as she had ought to have more broken nights?

She eventually decided that since she had already gone through two or three real, living nightmares, her subconscious had simply thrown up its hands at manufacturing pale imitations. When she did have disturbing dreams, the actual content was usually innocuous, even when the emotional overtones were oppressive enough to send her bolt upright in her bed, all cold sweat and pounding heart.

That night she dreamed, lying in her narrow metal bed in the women's wing of the Victorian industrialist's run-down mansion, and she came awake in a flash of absolute pounding terror.

As usual, there had been nothing to the dream. Abby, aged three and a half or four, sat in the sandbox that Aaron had built for her in the yard of their house in Berkeley, the house on the quiet street that they had lived in for several years until they had moved to the commune in Texas when Abby was five. The child sat shirtless in the warm sunlight, dribbling sand from an old soup ladle into a series of discarded yogurt tubs and Styrofoam egg cartons. A small black cat, one of the neighborhood animals that Anne chased off because it liked to use the sandbox as its cat tray, sat on one corner of the box, watching the concentrating child. Ana, or Anne, was in turn keeping her eye on the cat, not wanting to break into Abby's serious experiment by shooing the animal away, but also not willing to have it pee in the sand. She was weeding the flower bed that ran along the side fence, tossing clumps of grass and Oxalis into an old bucket and glancing up from time to time to be sure the cat had not ventured down from its perch, when she became aware of a man standing half hidden by the shrubs in the front of the yard, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the browned, half-naked child with the sun in her gleaming tumble of coal-black hair.

Ana came gasping awake, cold with terror and choking on the protest caught in her throat, a cry that she had to stand up and move into view and chase the man off but she couldn't because she was waking up now, and she could not reach back into her sleep to save Abby.

She lay still until the silence of the house overcame the pounding of her heart, and then swung her legs over the edge of the lumpy mattress and put face in her hands, trying to think if she had actually seen that man. There had been just such a threatening stranger while they lived in Berkeley, a situation that involved meetings of the local parents and police. She remembered clearly how reluctant they had all been, good Berkeley radicals all, to call in the police department over a problem they felt they ought to be able to deal with themselves, and how a core group of the mothers had finally forced the issue by pointing out that it was they who were usually alone with the kids during the day, not the fathers, so the decision was theirs to make, and they wanted the police. And regular uniformed presences had done the job, at least locally and temporarily, for the man had moved on, taken his disturbing and disturbed watching self away to haunt another neighborhood.

She had not thought of that episode in years, had not even thought of the Berkeley house for a long time. What would Maria make of the dream? she wondered, beginning to feel angry. She knew damn well that what she was feeling here in England was the same helpless rage she'd felt then, the same feeling of threat and oppression and the need to take some kind of action to protect a child. Why the hell did she need a dream to tell her all that?

She raised her head and looked at the bright shaft of bluish light that came through the gap in the curtains. Her first night in the room she had barely noticed it, one more strangeness among all the others, but the house was surrounded by brilliant floodlights. Presumably intended to keep away intruders? Tomorrow she would borrow a clothespin or a safety pin to close the gap so it wouldn't disturb her again.

The light cut diagonally across the foot of her bed and showed her the thin coverlet, the worn braided rug that reminded her of Dulcie's colorful efforts, left behind in Arizona for safekeeping, and her book, reading glasses, and wristwatch on the bedside table. It was not even three A.M., but Ana's body was trying to tell her that despite the position of the hands on the watch face, it was actually time to be awake and having some kind of meal. She wondered idly if Dulcie, too, was awake and begging Jason to play with her or find her something to eat.

She lay back down for a while, staring at the bare room. She had left the window open when she went to bed, and as she lay there she became aware of a heavy, sweet smell on the night air, the rich odor of the roses that grew in the bed below, underlaid by the dank fragrance of vegetation that arose out of the surrounding jungle. Ana had never much cared for heavy floral fragrances and had been known to remove pots of blooming narcissus from a room to an external windowsill. She found herself thinking about the Arizona landscape, its spiky shapes and small, waxy leaves, with an affection that verged on longing. What she wouldn't give for a boojum tree. There had been a similarly scented rose trained on an archway leading to the herb garden in Utah, she remembered, an annoyance due to the bees it attracted and the thorns that snagged at the unwary passerby—but she was not thinking about the past now; she would think about something else. Dulcie's church mice, perhaps.

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 panelled 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 psysiological 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 arm 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 hers, 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 grovelling 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 travelled 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 tense 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.

"You were afraid of me. Now you're not."

This was patently not true, but Ana responded carefully, "It was dark and you were a stranger. Now it's not, and you're not."

"And you have stopped to listen to the morning," he said with no recognition of the validity of her statement.

"It was very quiet earlier."

"It still is quiet back there in the deep woods."

"Really? Why?"

"This estate was built in the 1830s," he said. "The family was wiped out in the First World War and the flu epidemic that followed. The gardens deteriorated, the rides grew over, the outbuildings fell into disrepair and then into ruin.

"Change came here twelve years ago. This grotto we're sitting in was one of our first attempts at Transformation. It was so overgrown as to be impenetrable, a solid thicket of laurel and other shrubs grown to vast proportions. Not even bramble could grow. And like the area we were in earlier, there was no life. No birds, no animals, just the insects and funguses of decay.

"Our first action was destruction," he said with no small degree of relish. "Chain saws, bulldozers, and poison for the stumps—when we finished, there was devastation: a few top-heavy trees, a pile of stones where the summerhouse is, and bare, gouged earth. It resembled a First World War battleground, and had about as much life in it.

"And now birds and squirrels live here, the pond that was little more than a mud hole supports half a dozen kinds of fish, the soil that was sour and hard now smells sweet and gives life to a myriad of growing things."

The bearded man, seen clearly now, had a faraway, almost dreamy look on his face. His head was tipped back so that the thick black hair tumbled back on his shoulders; the untrimmed beard covered his face nearly to his cheekbones. Daylight confirmed nighttime's impression, that this was indeed a bear of a man. He was, oddly enough, the sort of man Ana normally found physically attractive, as big and furry as Aaron had been, or Antony Makepeace, or most of the men who ended up in her bed (other than Glen, but then, Glen was another thing altogether).

This bear, however, was no comforting presence, and Ana had no desire whatsoever to sink her fingers into his hair. She felt a fascination, certainly, but it was like the compulsion of reversed magnets, repellent face-to-face but with a strong tug from the back. This bear was more grizzly than teddy, appealing from a safe distance but murderous when crossed. Ana had a strong urge to sit, quiet and small in her corner, although at the moment he seemed almost unaware of her presence.

"The land and its Transformation is a paradigm for our real work here. From destruction comes forth life. From the ashes of fire beauty is born. Personally, I wanted to set the glade to the torch, to purify it down to the ground and the stones and see what came of it, but my friends and the county council disapproved of the idea. It would have been interesting, however. There are many seeds that come to life only after the touch of fire."

The deep, detached voice sent a cold thread down Ana's spine; she hugged the borrowed coat more tightly around her and closed her eyes.

She was abruptly aware of how terribly afraid she was, although she could not have said precisely why. Fear, like pain, was an old and familiar companion. She had long ago learned to distance herself, to use the very intensity of the sensation to create a wall between it and her. Pain or fear alike could rage through her body, but her essential self was left quiet in one small corner, aware but not overtaken.

This was different. The normal barriers refused to stay up, the spark of her being was flaring and fluttering madly in the gusts of emotion—the affection she felt for Dulcie and Jason crossed with the battering of memory and the assault of Change—and she could not find the point of balance that kept the fear-ridden Anne Waverly away from the calm essence at the center and allowed Ana Wakefield to get on with her work. There were too many pulls, too many anxieties and memories, and Anne would not go away. The situation was massively dangerous, to herself and to those around her. Ana had to be allowed to slide free; her intuitive and unthinking response to people and events was the key element that made her work for Glen possible. Why was that proving so difficult this time?

She opened her eyes. The morning was still sweet, and Jonas Fairweather was still looking at the side of her face. She turned to him and gave him a smile that felt like a rictus.

"Jonas," she said,"tell me about alchemical transformation."

Chapter Twenty-eight

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

"Alchemical transformation," Jonas said thoughtfully, sounding for all the world as if this were a new idea to him. "Ah yes, Steven seemed to think you had hidden talents in the field. Actually, my friend Steven knows I've been having some problems with my Work, and thought you might help. God knows he's tried everything else."

"Can I help?"

"I doubt it," he said flatly.

"So do I," she said. "But you never know."

He looked at her. "No, one never knows. So what are these hidden talents of yours, Ana Wakefield? What do you know about alchemy? What can you tell me about the fading memory of success, and experiments that fail, and a power nexus that has gone dead? Hmm?"

He was waiting. In a moment he would tire of her and walk away, and her opportunity would be lost, but for the life of her she couldn't think of anything clever enough to catch his interest. All she could come up with was his use of the phrase "power nexus", words Steven had used to refer to the alembic of transformation in which he had locked Jason, but that connection was too thin to build much on. In the end she was forced to fall back on the bare and aching truth.

"If I have hidden talents, they are hidden from me, too. And I know almost nothing about alchemy. I do know a great deal about memory, and about failure. And sometimes I think I know everything there is to know about being powerless."

After a minute, he said, "Refreshing, if nothing else. Shall I tell you how I became interested in alchemy?" He actually waited for her to say yes before he went on.

"It began when some friends and I decided to take a sabbatical from life and travel across Europe and the Middle East to India. We had money, we had time, so we went slowly and saw everything there was to see along the way.

"When we got to Bombay, we went to the caves at Elephanta, and there, before the image of Shiva's power, we met a young Parsi woman. A guide, as it turned out, in more ways than one. We talked, we went to her home and met her family, and there I encountered the old man who was to teach me everything.

"The Parsis are called fire worshipers, although that is a typically simplistic description of a complex tradition. I'm not going to bother telling you about them—if you're interested, read a book. The point is, the old Parsi was a questioner. He had reached back through his own tradition to a time when the essential fire—the fire of creation and not of destruction,—had been accessible to man.

"To make a long story short, he taught me to transmute matter. I would not have believed it possible—I did not believe it possible—but I saw it, a number of times, and in the end I had to lay down my doubts. He created gold. It was costly and it took weeks of great effort and intense concentration, but it was gold, created out of a lump of lead. And if you give voice to the disbelief that is in your face I shall hit you."

Ana gulped and erased any reaction whatsoever from her mind.

"I stayed with him for a year, I effected transmutation of matter six times under his supervision and three times alone, and I began the even longer and more laborious process of the Fabrication of the Tincture, about which I shall say nothing more.

"The time came to leave Bombay. We went across Iraq and Turkey, through southern Europe to Germany, and there we stopped to see some of the cities of the great period of European alchemy. While we were in a ridiculous, childish, so-called re-creation of an alchemical laboratory, I had a vision.

"I saw the moon clad in white, with great streams of colored sweat pouring down her face as she gave birth to a man with a thick head of golden hair, lying right there on the floor of the museum. When the man was fully birthed she held him out to me to take, and when I reached forward, my vision sank into a great bed of flame and disappeared. What do your hidden talents and powerlessness say of that, Ana Wakefield?"

Before she could formulate any semblance of an answer, Jonas unfurled his legs and stood up, setting off down the hill in the direction of the lake. She scrambled upright and tottered off after him. On the close turf at the edge of the water, they stood looking at a family of ducklings plopping off their nest into the water.

"Steven told me you and he have practiced fire walking," she said.

"It was part of the learning process, that the artifex might be aligned with the product in his alembic."

"Do you still do it? Firewalk?"

"Not in some time. It was necessary only at the beginning. Why do you bring it up?"

"Just interested. Something about what you said, the "bed of flame" in your vision, I guess it was, made me think of it."

He fixed her with a long and peculiar look. She felt pinned down by it, caught by the intensity of his gaze, and when he opened his mouth, she braced herself for revelation. In anticlimax, all he said was, "I want my breakfast now."

They walked on through the restored woodlands, and although he was still difficult to read, she thought Jonas seemed as pleased as if he had found a new disciple—which, Ana reflected, he had.

"You should thank alchemists for the distillation of alcohol. Do you drink?" He did not pause for her answer. "The scientific process, the discovery of ammonium sulphate. Algebraic formulation we owe to Jabir ibn Hayyan, nitric acid…"

The words washed over her, but she made no effort to remember them, merely listening intently for a clue, a sign of what he needed from her. Elixirs and dragons; the characteristics of mercury; the alchemical references in Ben Jonson; the names Kalid ibn Yazid and Cheng Wei, Robert of Chester and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton, Abu Bakr and Charles II; the magnificent Latinate stages of the alchemical process, the seven or twelve or more levels of transformation from the prima materia and the nigredo of dissolutio to the white of purificatio and the red of the Stone itself; the links between the planets and the metals; the alignment necessary between the artifex and his universe and the work going on within the alembic.

On and on he went, like a breached dam it poured out, and although the half-hour walk back to the house seemed interminable, it also seemed too short, because listen as she might—and how she listened!—she did not hear the clue she was waiting for.

Did Jonas want an assistant? An interpreter? Twice she ventured a remark into his flood. The first time, when he was describing the role of the alchemist in society, she ventured a comment about shamanism that he seized with glee and approval. He talked about Siberia and Native American shamanism, the sacred journey and the return to the tribe with a holy object. When that merged into a description of the properties of the Philosopher's Stone, Ana listened attentively before interjecting a remark about longevity. This time the remark was ignored, as if she had not spoken. She did notice, though, that eventually he included a lengthy review of the evidence of immortality among alchemists, which took them as far as the house.

Once in the grand marble entrance hall, shucking off the borrowed coat, Ana said tentatively, "You said there were photographs of the gardens…?"

Clear breakfast sounds came from the dining hall, but Jonas swept her into the first room, the one with the small television set, to display a series of before-and-after pictures. The grotto in its earlier stage looked like a jungle—she would not have been surprised to see a sloth or a monkey peeping out of the greenery. A montage showed a narrow path through a wall of branches being peeled back to become an airy ride, with two helmeted riders perched atop a pair of horses. A stretch of muck from which emerged dead trees, a few bog plants, and the handle of a shopping cart achieved its transformation as the pristine lake that she had seen at the foot of the summerhouse, complete in the photograph with two children in a rowboat and a trio of swans.

Jonas tapped a blunt finger on the glass over a tree. "We counted seven bird nests in that tree the year this picture was taken. Two years before there was not one,"

"A remarkable transformation," she said.

Jonas displayed a lot of white teeth surrounded by hair, which she assumed was a grin, although it looked more aggressive than appreciative.

"Breakfast," he said, and left the room.

Ana followed slowly, so that she was still in the corridor when he entered the dining room. There was an immediate drop in the hubbub of conversation and clatter as his presence was acknowledged, but the pause was nothing compared to the brief moment of absolute stillness that fell over the gathering when Ana walked in on his heels. Surprise, speculation, and consternation, all over in a moment when the scores of conversations were resumed in loud and nervous tones to cover up the silence.

Ana cursed under her breath. She should have thought of how it would look, the new woman walking in for breakfast with the guru. But surely they couldn't think—Okay, she wasn't completely hideous, and she was about his age, but surely—

They could, and some of them obviously did.

At first she was annoyed by the community's swift assumption, irritated at the obsessive childishness of the group when it came to their leader. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in one of the stainless steel covers of the warming trays, and she had to laugh at the thought of this crop-haired, graying, peculiarly dressed woman who looked all of her forty-eight years accused of vamping the guru. It was too silly.

It had been a long time since the three A.M. cheese-and-crackers, and she filled a plate and carried it to an unoccupied corner to reflect. Her thoughts fluttered around madly like a cage full of panicky songbirds: Jonas and Jason, Dulcie and the absent Sami, cabbage seedlings and a grotto put to the torch, a dog sent tumbling by a massive hand and a dead boy in Japan with bloody fingernails. She did not know what to do, she could not control the images in her head, and she had never felt so far from home. I've got to get out of here, she thought. The hell with Glen, and except for two people, I don't care what happens to Change. I can't do this. I can't. Not this time.

She heard the panic building in her thoughts, and wrenched them back from the abyss. Grabbing the handle of her fork like a weapon, she stared furiously down at her plate.

Jesus Christ! she raged at herself. You go around ordering a fourteen-year-old kid to use his head—what about you? Think, for God's sake! It's supposed to be what you do best, isn't it? You study a religious vocabulary, you figure out how to speak it, and then you use its symbols to manipulate people. What the hell difference does it make if it's an individual instead of a community? Jonas Seraph speaks a language: learn it. What is his key? don't think with your guts, woman—that won't help anyone. Stand back and look at the problem sensibly. Use the brain that God gave you and that Glen and Antony Makepeace and a score of others pounded into shape.

First, review the facts: What had she learned that morning between the time when she had woken up with the floodlights shining through her curtain and the moment she had sat down at this scarred table?

Well, she had learned who the mysterious Jonas was. Oh, yes.

She'd learned that he was nuts, just to be technical, and that he liked to… She went still. She'd learned that he liked to talk. He needed to talk, and yes, he had indeed told her what he needed of her, not in a word or a phrase but in a spate of them. He did not want her to do anything; he just needed someone to listen. Not necessarily someone clever enough to work with, or knowledgeable enough to suggest alternative processes to his own Work, but a bright smile with an adequate mind behind it to talk to. Yes, a disciple. Whether by accident or by the machinations of her subconscious, she had struck precisely the right note, and she had found her role: intelligent passivity. A boy like Jason would not do as a sounding board because he tried too hard and lacked the experience; a man like Marc Bennett had his own agenda; and the woman Sami had lost patience with his genius and left.

And there was no doubt of his genius. He was, as she would have anticipated, extremely knowledgeable about everything to do with metallurgy, from the mining of ore to atomic structure, but he had obviously also spent a lifetime ransacking the world's disciplines for shiny bits of knowledge. Botany, physiology, astronomy, linguistics, history—you name it, he had at least looked inside.

Right. She could fill the position of intelligent audience. It might drive her mad, but she could do it. What else did she know about him?

She'd discovered that he was a man who could drag a woman into the dark woods, lay hands on her, stand inches from her, even talk about sex with her and yet not rape her, not come on to her, not even sound remotely suggestive to her. Not a talent possessed by many men. And she might have thought him to be one of life's intellectual eunuchs but for the communal reaction when she had followed him in: The Change community believed that Jonas was currently without a woman but that such a state of affairs (so to speak) was quite possible, and in this tight-knit group, she was willing to credit common belief with sure knowledge.

Sami, then, had been here, had been his woman in some way or other, and had not been replaced.

Yet.

Ana stopped chewing. No, she would not—could not—seduce Jonas with her body; the very idea was as absurd as it was distasteful. But with her mind—no, go for the man's weak spot: with her spirit, she could indeed offer to fill the gap in his life. His spiritual life.

Think, woman.

Alchemy: the key to his mind and method had to lie there. Alchemy was by no means just a phenomenon of medieval Europe and the Age of Reason; the very name was from the Arabic, and alchemical writings and speculations were spread in a wide swath across the Middle East, out from the China that most probably gave it birth. In China as in India, the miraculous transformation of base matter into gold was inextricably linked to the idea of energy centres rising in the body. The erotic disciplines of Tantra and Kundalini in India, the esoteric sexual branches of the tree that was Taoism in China, all were rooted, back in their beginnings, in alchemy, and all… all rested squarely on the dual nature of the human being: a union of opposites, conjunctio oppositorum; The Hermaphrodite, a name for the Stone; the symbol of king and queen joined together; the alchemist as artifex with his soror mystica, his mystic sister, at his side. As another discipline put it: Male and female made he them.

Man and woman together explore the mysteries, yang and yin, sun and moon, gold and silver. If she could remind Jonas of this tradition, far older than that of the solitary European male working in his laboratory, if she could convince him of it, she might at the very least buy herself some time while he thought it over. At this point, time was gold.

Ana put down her fork and looked around for Jonas.

With half the community watching, Ana went after Jonas, and when she had tracked him down in the small and separate dining room used by the high-ranking initiates, its tables elegant with white linen and crystal glasses, she arranged with him for another interview at five that afternoon. She walked with dignity back through the dining hall and up to her room, planning to have a bath (it being England, "shower baths" were few and far between) and offer her labor to the garden for the day. When she reached her room, though, and shut the door behind her, she was hit by a wave of exhaustion and jet lag combined with the shuddering release of tension, and she dropped down onto the bed fully clothed for a ten-minute nap.

Three hours later, the sound of voices going past her door woke her. She took her oldest jeans and a T-shirt down the hallway to the bathroom, splashed herself in a tub of tepid water, and dressed. Downstairs she found lunch being set out, so she assembled a sandwich and went outside to present herself to the gardeners.

She was given the inevitable wide-brimmed hat and a short-handled garden fork, and as she took the tool, she realized wryly that her faraway dream of spending her free hours turning soil was about to be fulfilled. She dug until blisters opened along both palms, when she was sent to tote instead: hay to the horses, firewood to the house, and finally stones in a wheelbarrow to a wall being restored.

After four hours of hard labor, she felt as if she had been beaten about the shoulders and back. Her legs trembled, her hand and knee throbbed, her palms were aflame; every muscle in her body protested. Worst of all, she had not given a thought to her coming interview with Jonas. Whoever said that mindless labor gave one a chance to think had never hauled rock in a barrow with a crooked wheel. But the haunting memories had drawn back momentarily into their pit; for that she was willing to suffer greater discomfort than this.

At four-thirty Ana laid down her load and went in to grab a mug of tea and another bath. There was no getting the soil from under her nails, but at least she didn't stink when she presented herself at Jonas's study.

The Change leader's room was at the bottom of a dim, dank set of stairs under the kitchen, in a part of the house that the Victorian family upstairs had probably never set foot in. She stood on the uneven stones that formed the floor and looked longingly at the three firmly closed doors in front of her. All three had new, sturdy-looking locks. Although she would have given much to see behind them, she had no choice but to turn and walk beneath the stairway to the open door of Jonas's study.

"Lair" might have been a more accurate description. It was a big room, twenty-five feet across and nearly twenty high, and from the looks of it had been the original kitchen, back when servants were expected to run upstairs with heavy platters of hot food rather than taint the upper air with the sounds and smells of cooking. The high windows, excavated below ground level, may once have lit the space adequately: now they were so covered with uneven bead curtains as to be indistinguishable from the walls, aside from a certain glow behind the beads.

Or not beads—objects, thousands of objects hung up against the light on strings and ribbons and fishing line. With themes—one window held nothing but drinking vessels, from commemorative teacups to the small mended pottery anaphoras of an archaeological dig, while the next one had figurines from all over the world, all less than two inches in height. The third one seemed to be sticks and rocks until Ana looked more closely and saw that they were bones: chicken bones, bird skulls, the articulated foot of some small mammal, and near the bottom an object that looked disconcertingly like the skull of an infant human being. She hoped it was a monkey.

Jonas was reading a newspaper, apparently a current one, which seemed to her somehow extraordinary, particularly as he wore steel-framed half-glasses to do so. He looked up as she came in, and his eyebrows raised as if he had no idea who she was or what she wanted. She tore her gaze from the strange window coverings and offered him a tentative smile.

"Ana Wakefield. You told me to come at five?"

His face did not change as he said, "I hope you are wearing more adequate footwear than you did this morning."

She nodded, and he pulled off his glasses and tossed them and the paper on top of the huge wooden desk that was piled high with papers, journals, used coffee cups, and more books than Ana could have gotten through in a month.

"Wait here," he told her. "I need to urinate."

It was indeed a lair, or a den, or one of the illustrations of medieval alchemical laboratories come to life, lacking only the actual tools of the trade. She would not have been surprised to see Rackham's awe-struck alchemical gnome lurking in one corner. Tables were heaped high with books and papers, plates of half-eaten food and cups bristling with pens and pencils. The ballpoint pens seemed anachronistic, to say nothing of the elaborate computer array with scanner, phone line, and an industrial-strength-sized external hard drive: quills and an abacus would have been more appropriate. High, dark bookshelves held literally thousands of books, many several inches thick and hand-bound in ancient leather, but others considerably more recent, and she had a true shock when she saw a familiar spine tucked between two books from the end of the nineteenth century: Jonas had a copy of Anne Waverly's Cults Among Us on his shelf, and she was very glad that she had refused to have an author photo placed on the inner flap. It was disconcerting, as if she had caught sight of Glen peeping through the windows: comforting, but she could only hope no one else noticed.

Jonas came back and found her standing in the same spot as when he had left. He ran his gaze over the room as if to make sure he had not forgotten anything, then grunted, and walked out. She took the grunt as an invitation, or a command, but as she turned to follow, she glanced over at the headlines of the paper he had been reading, and caught the words AMERICAN CULT. She swore under her breath; all she needed was for another notch of pressure on Change. If the media climbed onto the current load of problems, it would not make her time there any easier.

"Why do they so love the word 'cult'?" Jonas was saying irritably. "They use it as a term of opprobrium, certainly of derision. Did you know that 'cult' is from the Latin cultus, from the verb colere, meaning to inhabit or care for a place? And that it is related to the Greek kyklos, wheel, which in turn is linked to the Sanskrit chakra? You do know what a chakra is?" he demanded, stopping on the stairs to peer down at her.

This time he seemed to want his question answered, so she obediently said, "It means wheel, too, doesn't it? Or the energy centers of the body that are depicted as wheels."

He grunted and continued. "Cultivate, culture, they're all the same, though I would say in this country we're more a cultigen than a cultivar. You don't have the faintest idea what I'm taking about, do you?"

"Cults," she said promptly.

"I suppose," he said, and led her out of doors.

They walked again, out into the jungle that had once been the formal gardens of an estate. Twice they went through green walls that she would have considered impenetrable, but Jonas knew just where to push his way, and they continued.

And he talked. She was well on her way to establishing herself as his soror mystica, she thought, but she had begun to feel a deep sympathy for Sami Dooley. When she got caught on a branch as he was telling her about the life of Arnold of Villanova, he merely reached back and hauled her bodily through the gouging, scraping branches. She tried to raise her spirits by the thought of what a fascinating study she would someday write of this whole episode, but the humor was halfhearted and the pain too sharp, and more immediate was the knowledge that she was being led off into the lonely woods by a man who made her feel as if she were carrying a rattlesnake in her coat pocket.

Focus! she ordered fiercely. Think, you stupid woman. Listen to what he's saying, this modern alchemist who believes, with all the power of his stunted emotions and considerable intellect, that the very nature of matter can be transformed by the application of a precise set of changes, forces, circumstances. Listen to his words, pick out his key images and the central ideas that drive him; use them to nudge him toward where you want him to be. Yes, he's a goddamn genius, but even the brightest minds have their blind spots, and you are about to become his. You can do this. You have to.

The path had cleared somewhat, and Ana walked just behind Jonas, her hands clasped behind her back, her head bent to catch his words, the perfect disciple. He was talking again about the stages of transformation that the prima materia goes through on its path to perfection into gold. She waited until he came to a resting point, and then she asked him a question.

"I do see that is like the rising of the Kundalini through the chakras. Don't the Chinese call them chis?"

That set him off on the topic of nerve centers and the rising of energies, sexual and otherwise, and the Indian/Chinese ties throughout history. Ana walked quietly, listening to his remarkably explicit descriptions of the frankly erotic discipline of Tantra and then asked him, struggling to keep the question matter-of-fact, "To what extent do you think the alchemists saw the Kundalini as a metaphorical idea rather than actual, physical Tantra yoga?"

She might have been asking about rocks for all the overtones his answer held. "The alchemist always speaks on several levels at once: literal, then metaphorical, and then on the plane where the literal and the metaphorical are one. He who has ears to hear, let him hear." He then went on to speak about the role of the soror mystica, the mystical sister, during the course of which he left Ana in no doubt about the distinctly non-sisterly actions that Sami had performed for him, and in great doubt about why she had possibly thought of him as an asexual being. He seemed unconscious that she might be feeling any discomfort, but she was distinctly relieved when he finally abandoned the topic of the metaphysical energies aroused by various sexual positions and wandered on to discuss the nature of the "pure dew" that some medieval recipes specified was to be gathered for the process—was it actual on-the-leaves morning dew or, rather, a virgin's urine?—and then shifted into the esoteric objects used in various alchemical recipes. That kept him busy for a while, but eventually he mentioned, for the third time since they had met, the problem he was having with the current Work, and Ana knew she had to seize her opportunity. She summoned every scrap of sincerity and innocence that she could find and put it into her voice.

"Um, Jonas? When you talk about the need of the alchemist to be in balance, both with the external universe and with the microcosm within the alembic, and also about the duality of the Stone, I just wondered if you'd ever considered pairing up for your Work with one of the high-ranking women initiates in Change, to give you the balance of duality? It's just a thought."

There it was, presented to him by the tentative, always helpful, never threatening Ana Wakefield. With any luck, he would soon believe that he had thought of the solution himself.

Just then however, he had something else on his mind. They had been walking in a rough circle and were now headed back toward the house and into the sunset, when the thick growth abruptly stopped, as it had that morning at the grotto. This open space, though, seemed somehow less restored than it did preserved, as if nothing but green grass had ever grown in a wide rectangular space around the low, crumbling walls of what had once been a sizable building. It was quiet there, but it was not the utter silence of lifelessness and strangulation; what she heard was the hush of content and respect.

"Abby," said Jonas, to Ana's confusion and shock. When she did not answer, he turned and saw her strange expression, and frowned.

"The abbey," he repeated. "This was a Benedictine abbey until the Dissolution of Henry the Eighth. This particular part of the estate is an historical preserve, or else I might have been tempted to do more restoration work. I'm glad I didn't: It took me years to discover that this is the energy center of the land around, and a line drawn from here to the house precisely bisects, at right angles, the line between Stonehenge and Glastonbury. Can't you feel the energy?"

Ana nodded obediently, a bit too distracted to feel the subtle ley lines under her feet. It was, however, a very lovely spot, and she felt that she would like to return there under different circumstances.

She walked forward into the cruciform ruins, entering at what had been the front doors of the building. In some places the stones of the nave walls were missing completely, and in others the grass and wildflowers grew up over the tumbled stonework to waist height. The remnants of the walls were taller at the end of the building where the altar had been; they rose past Ana's head, and the base of one of the windows could be seen, its decorative carving long weathered into soft shapelessness. Small ferns and wallflowers had rooted themselves among the cracks.

Once away from the walls, the entire floor of the abbey was a smooth carpet of green turf set with tiny white wildflowers, but for one massive rectangular stone which, judging by its location, marked where the altar had stood. Someone had taken care to keep its surface clear of grass, trimming the edges back—in fact, the entire stone looked renewed, as if it had been lifted and relaid to keep it from sinking into the earth and disappearing entirely. It did not even have much moss on it. Jonas may have decided that this point marked his ley line, which would be an ironic variation on the ancient Christian tradition of building a church on the holy ground of its predecessors: the New Age reclaims a Christian site for its primal energy potentials. Ana stood with her toes nearly touching the revealed stone, looking up, trying to conjure up the ghostly outlines of the church that had once formed the center of this lively monastic community.

When Jonas's hands came down on her shoulders she nearly leapt out of her skin. He heard her gasp and slid his grip down to her upper arms. He squeezed once, and then moved around to the other side of the altar stone, taking care not to step on the stone itself. She lifted her eyes to his, and could not pull them away as he began to speak.

"The Philosopher's Stone, the object of alchemical labors that provides immortality and turns base metal to gold, is also called The Hermaphrodite. It is the union of all opposites. Male and female, hot and cool," he said, his words like a chant. "The dry and the wet, the wise and the innocent, the red of the sulphur and the silver of mercury, the generative power of the sun and the reflective forces of the moon. Alchemical drawings depict this union as a king and a queen lying together in the coffin of their alembic. The Absolute, the Brahman, the Stone, the Tincture, is a union of Shiva and Shakti, destruction and nurturing, the seed and the blood, the male and the female. It is the stage beyond the gold, and it renders the participants immortal.

"Since the first blacksmith discovered iron, man has been applying fire to dull stone and creating miracles. The unrefined human being, rocklike and dumb, is no different from gold-bearing ore. It takes only the right technique—the right knowledge—the proper manipulation of forces, to transmute a mere man into something greater, something miraculous. My Parsi master took me to meet immortals, men who could pierce themselves and not bleed, be bitten by cobras and not die. My teacher himself is three hundred and twelve years old, and looks to be sixty. Immortality and the power to heal, those are the characteristics of the human Philosopher's Stones I have met.

"It is also what my entire life has been leading to. I learned to walk on burning coals without feeling pain, that I might become a Master of Fire. That was one of the titles the alchemists used of themselves, did you know that, Ana? Master of Fire. The next step, my transmutation into a human Philosopher's Stone, a walking tincture, also involves, as you yourself interpreted from my vision, a walk not over fire, but through it. Amusing to think that I have spent twelve years of my life studying the patterns of transformation in this laboratory of mine, and you should come here and tell me something that is plain before my eyes. Your hidden talent, indeed, to see what is needed. I must remember to thank Steven." He chuckled, a rumble deep in his chest that reminded Ana of a waking bear.

His gaze held her, locked her to the turf, quaking to her bones. The most terrifying thing was the man's complete rationality, the impression he gave that what he believed and what he proposed—whatever it was he was proposing—was utterly reasonable. Ana tried to speak, cleared her throat, and tried again in a strangled voice.

"What do you want me to do?"

He smiled at her engagingly, even sweetly, and with complete patience and confidence in her. "That's the beauty of it. You don't need to do anything, not until the very last part of the process. You just need to be yourself, the cool, wet, innocent moon-woman, as male and female join together in the furnace and conjoin into immortality."

If Jonas had moved so much as a muscle in her direction, Ana would have broken and fled shrieking into the green woods. Instead, he looked down at the altar stone at their feet, studying its rough surface as if deciphering some secret text carved into its surface. He dropped to his heels and tickled his blunt fingertips delicately back and forth over the scrubbed stone, a thoughtful, sensuous gesture that Ana felt as a caress up her spine. She flushed at the disturbing ghostly sensation, and Jonas smiled to himself, patted the stone as if it were an old friend, and then in an abrupt and characteristic return to the prosaic, he stood up, glanced at the lowering sun, and said, "We're going to miss dinner if we don't hurry." He clambered over a low place in the walls, dislodging several stones in the process, and made off in the direction of the house.

She was sorely tempted to let him go, even it it meant spending the night on the altar stone. She might easily have remained behind, frozen there among the abbey ruins, had it not been for the knowledge that Jonas was moving back toward the house where Jason and Dulcie were sheltering. She could not leave them alone with him. With infinite reluctance she took a step in the direction he had gone, and then another.

She who has ears to hear, let her hear.

And Ana heard. Another woman might have picked up the nuances of spirituality in his words and been pleased with her understanding, but Ana had seen, had literally been witness to, the extreme behavior that people were capable of in the pursuit of religious truth, and her ears told her that this was no metaphor. Whatever it was Jonas did in his alchemical laboratory, he had convinced himself and Steven and all the others that he and they could change matter into gold. But it did not stop with the walls of the actual laboratory, not for a man with Jonas Seraph's massive intellect and self-absorption. The estate itself, bought with his inheritance, had become in his mind his laboratory, from the grotto where his curiosity about fire's purification had been thwarted to the current inhabitants and their peculiarities and characteristics. Jonas thought of this place as his workroom, where he might observe the principles of Change functioning. Which made Ana and everyone else here, in effect, his personal prima materia.

That kind of godlike vision of the world, ironically, depends on the adoration of others, to bring the venerated one food and carry out his wishes. Samantha Dooley had gotten tired of it and passed on, only to have her shoes filled by a born personal assistant to this small universe's CEO. Marc Bennett could strut and crow and order people about to his heart's desire, and Jonas would continue to treat him as a piece of furniture, because in Jonas's mind, that was what all people were.

Ana pulled her coat around her, feeling the cold as the sun went down and as the sudden thought hit her that perhaps Sami Dooley had not tired of her role; perhaps she had been pushed too far.

When was that large amount of nitrate fertilizer bought? She couldn't remember, but she was certain it had been for Britain, not Boston. Was it purchased shortly before the arguments started between Jonas and Sami? The two things might have nothing to do with each other, but she could feel the disquieting possibility of that fertilizer's purpose nibbling at the edges of her mind.

She knew Jonas had to have a human-sized alembic in the cellars, behind one of those three locked doors. What else could he use as his "power nexus" for the conjoining with his moon-woman? What concerned her more, though, was the question of how he intended to apply the necessary heat. Would it be from six small brick furnaces such as those that had kept Jason warm during his solitary trial under Steven? Or was Jonas insane enough to think of something bigger, something more suited to the dramatic transformation of a man into a Philosopher's Stone? Something as explosive on the outside of the alembic as what was due to go on in the inside?

It was insane, sure, but Ana could not keep from wondering: Just how big a fire it would take to transmute a man into an immortal?

She had been right her first night here, terribly close to the truth: This really was Texas revisited, and Utah. Here she was again, with two young hostages in the hands of her enemy and the responsibility for the entire community on her shoulders; the difference was, this time she knew it. In Texas another woman, a far different Ana, had selfishly walked away from the only people who mattered to her, so engrossed in her own problems that she was blind to the signs, deaf to the warning bells, dangerously, murderously ignorant.

No more. She could see this man playing with his vision, turning it over in his big, hard hands, changing and shaping it until it matched his idea of perfection. A moment's fear, a sudden conviction that "they" had infiltrated to his bosom and were about to take his Work away from him, and he would move instantly to set the final Transformation in motion. She could all but smell the danger, and her ears rang with the ghostly echo of gunfire, her nostrils twitched with the remembered stink of fresh blood and old death.

Her only hope was to keep her wits about her and to get help.

On her own, she could do little more than seize Jason and Dulcie and flee, evading the camouflage-clad guard and hoping to make it as far as the main road and the arms of the constabulary. But what then, when their abrupt departure was discovered and Jonas realized that his chance for immortality was slipping away from him? Would he grab out for another and set off on his ultimate quest? And if so, who would be Ana's substitute? The innocent Sara? Or perhaps young, blonde Dierdre? And what would it do to Jason and Dulcie when they eventually found out what their salvation had cost? What does it profit a man, that he gain his life and lose the world?

Ana could not both protect the two children and keep an eye on Jonas, not for long. She had to have help. She could try to break into the phone system, call Glen—but had he even received her last letter yet? And how long would it take him to set up a response in a foreign country? A long time, knowing governments; longer even than it would take her, a private citizen of a foreign country, to work her way through the local authorities until she found someone… Too long. Furthermore, although she longed to hear Glen's cold and competent voice, craved his presence with a lust stronger than sex, a single man on a white horse was not about to make much difference.

Once, long long ago, she had thought that fear was the energy that kept her persona together, a potential resource like pain or desperation that with acceptance and rigid concentration could be shaped and used. Not this kind of fear. This fear was too deep to be grasped, too slippery to be handled, too disorienting to be accepted; it left her utterly alone and directionless, wishing she could crumple into a corner and weep like a child.

That was not possible. She just had to pull herself together—the ghosts of murders past were getting in her way, obscuring her vision of what was and what she must do. Her only option was the same one she had been following since she arrived here, that of watch and wait. This was no time to lose control, and the all too obvious fact that she had no business being here, that she was no longer capable of doing this work, could not be helped. She would just have to shove her panic back into its box and do her best: there was no one else.

And think about it: Jonas wanted her voluntarily, which meant that he either had no wish to drag her into the alembic with him or, more likely, he could not envision the necessity. She needed to see the basement, to examine the alembic itself and to see if there was any sign of a nitrate bomb. She would have to convince him of her need to see his workshop, just as she had convinced him that he needed her as the key to his great transformation. Work herself in to his side, hope he left open his telephone or—better—that modemed computer, and get a message to Glen.

Yes, she had to have help. Agreed, there was no way she could do this alone for more than another few days. The best way of obtaining that help was the same way she always did: write a journal entry for Glen.

Only this time she'd have to make damned certain that nobody found it, because there would be no pretty subterfuge here. Write down the truth, in all its detail, and then she would either get herself a map of the estate and sneak off to a mailbox, or feed the pages through Jonas's scanner and slap the result into an e-mail to Glen. That would take less time than Jonas had been gone to urinate.

Buy time, call for help, act normal.

And the hardest of these is normality.

Chapter Twenty-nine

proposed article on theological synthesis

titles: Dream Logic

Signs and Portents

The Apocalyptic Mind

Intro: One of the eearier more frightening sides of religious synthesis is the apparent lack of rational thought, the willingness of the participants to embrace wildly disparate ideas and images and then to make great leaps in interpretation and meaning. To the apocalyptic mind, signs and portents abound, messages wait in the most obscure places, and the whole of creation pulsates with Meaning, for the one who can truly See. There is no coincidence, no casual link in the universe: everything is connected.

(Examples: —Judaism & the minutiae of kashrut rules—holiness is in the details

—Post-resurrection Christianity, sifting the life of Jesus for symbols and unseen prophecies

—Modern examples-Heaven's Gate, etc.)

To the apocalyptist, who literally awaits the Great Uncovering, all coincidence is synchronicity, all accident revelation.

(note: intro ideas of archetypal/depth psych?? Examples in therapeutic situations, or Biblical dream interp???))

… It is the same logic one finds in the interpretation of dreams, where all events are related, where enlightenment comes with the understandings of links and the symbols thrust up from the unconscious.

What would seem to most of us a coincidence of minor importance, to the searching mind becomes a road sign to holiness. The unpredictability of these minds makes it very difficult to forecast where Meaning will be found.

If we wish to understand, we must contrive to stand over this person and look over his (her) shoulder, listening to his inner dialogue and duplicating his close scrutiny of his surroundings, before we can even begin to predict his interpretation of events, his understanding of portents. Like the chemist who knows what reagent will set off a certain reaction in his beaker-and even then, the being human individuals rather than simple chemicals, the variables are great, and it is easy to be very wrong.

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

The smell of food in the dining hall filled Ana with nausea, but she craved something hot to drink. She took a mug and filled it from the big urn, added sugar, and took it to her corner, where she cupped her hands around it as if the tiny heat it gave off would drive away the coldness of her bones. Three mugs later her thirst was slaked but she was still shivering in the warmth of the dining hall.

Then she looked up and saw Dulcie, and one glance at the child's expression cut her shivering off. Dulcie needed her; there was no time for weakness.

"Hello, Dulcinea," she said gently. "How's my squire this evening?"

The child shrugged, a motion so like her brother that Ana wanted to reach out and pull Dulcie to her, burying that sad, remote little face in her embrace. Instead, she put her mug down on the table and stood up, casually holding out her hand to the girl.

"Why don't you show me your room, Dulcie? Then I'll show you where mine is. Sorry my hand's so rough and covered with Band-Aids—I spent the afternoon digging and I got a bunch of blisters. I shouldn't call them Band-Aids, though, should I? Here they're sticking plasters. I wonder why they call them plasters? Plaster is that white stuff they cover walls with, that turns really hard and you can paint it. You remember that gray mud that Tom and Danny were using back in Arizona, that would get big blobs in their hair and when they came to meals they'd look really funny? Oh my little sweetheart, what's the matter?"

Dulcie had drifted to a halt halfway up the stairs and was now just standing, one hand limp in Ana's, her shoulders drooping and her head down. She was crying. Ana sat down on the upper step and pulled Dulcie to her. The child was pliable but unresponsive, weeping as if she were too tired and dispirited to do anything else. Ana crooned wordlessly and rocked her, oblivious to the people coming and going on the stairway, aware only of the small, warm head of hair tucked under her chin, and the slack hopelessness of this young body, and eventually the shuddering intake of breath as the tears tapered off. When the tears ended, some of Ana's own hopelessness seemed to have worked itself out as well.

"Where is your room, Dulcie?" she asked. The child stood without speaking, and they continued up the stairs and down the hallway, Ana's hand resting on the back of Dulcie's neck. Dulcie chose a door and Ana followed her in. She picked up the child and sat her down on the bed with the teddy bear from the pillow, and then sat next to her. Dulcie leaned into Ana's arm.

"What's wrong?" she asked the child again.

"I want to go home."

"Home to Arizona? To where Steven is? Or home—?" Where was the child's home, anyway?

"To Steven."

"Why are you unhappy here? Jason's here."

"No."

"He isn't?" Ana looked quickly around the room: shoes in the corner, a familiar plaid shirt over a chair, books and papers on the desk—all reassuring signs that a teenager lived there.

"He's always doing things. Talking to Her, or That Man."

"Jonas, you mean? And who's 'Her'?"

" The girl." Dulcie's voice vibrated with disgust.

Ah. "Do you mean Dierdre?" Dulcie nodded. "Dulcie, listen to me. Jason loves you. He's just excited to be in a new place, and it's hard for him to keep his mind on things. I'll have a talk with him, okay? Ask him to settle down a little?"

Dulcie nodded, then said, "But I still want to go home."

Ana thought for a minute and decided it was best not to bring That Man into it at all, but, rather, to dwell on the positive side. "There are some nice things here. Have you seen the barn with the horses? And there's lots of kids."

"I can't understand them."

"Their accents, you mean?"

"They talk funny. Like on TV."

"You know, I'll bet they think you talk funny like TV, too. There's a lot of American shows on English television." Not that the Change kids saw much TV, come to think of it, but never mind. "Come on, let's go see the horses go to bed."

Ana spent the next hour coaxing and amusing the child out of her feeling of abandonment. Dulcie found the horses beautiful, the lambs amusing, the cats still at the kitchen door, and the voices around her not quite as unintelligible as she had thought. At the end of their tour they went to see Ana's room. Ana let her look around, bounce on her bed, and paw through her meager belongings, and then told the child that she could come to visit anytime she wanted.

They talked for a while about church mice and other important matters, and then Ana took Dulcie down a set of stairs and along the long corridor and around a corner to the room the child shared with her brother. Jason leapt out of his chair at their entrance, looking worried and angry, but before he could berate Dulcie for disappearing, Ana broke in.

"Oh, Jason, there you are. Sorry I didn't leave you a note to tell you I'd taken Dulcie down to see the animals in the barn, I should have realized you'd wonder where she was. Dulcie, maybe you should pop in and have a bath after petting all those horses and playing with the cats. Need a hand?"

After the child was dispatched to the bathroom down the hall, Ana lingered to talk with Jason about school and work and how he had spent his day. His dark eyes were alive with enthusiasm and she enjoyed the rare—the formerly rare—sight of Jason Delgado smiling, twice. His animation and willingness to talk to her at length about ordinary things were disorienting but steadying, and as enormously comforting as the physical contact with his sister had been earlier.

"You know," she told him gently when he paused to draw breath, "Dulcie seemed kind of lonely and a little upset tonight. You've been busy, and she was feeling left out. Though I'm glad you're enjoying it here."

"It's all right," he said, adding, "I like some of the people."

"You're going to miss the basketball," she said.

"Season's over anyway."

"Tomorrow after lunch, let's get together and look at what you and the others need to do to finish the school year. Dov and I brought the final exams with us" (a thousand years ago, it seemed) "so maybe you could take them early and have the summer ahead of you."

"You don't think we'll be going home before school's out, then?"

"Doesn't sound like it to me. Why, did Steven say you were?"

"Nobody said anything," he said with a wry grimace. "Just 'get on the plane.' I didn't even know we had passports."

She did not tell him that it was standard procedure at Change for new members to apply for passports, or whenever possible for minors to have the application made for them. International experiences (carefully monitored, of course) were used as a selling point by the school.

"Well, I hope you get to see something of the country while you're here." Dulcie was making final splashing noises down the hall. "Tomorrow is our half day, you know that?" Once a week, in addition to Sundays, the Change residents had an afternoon free. Thursday was theirs. "After the school meeting, assuming I'm free, I'd like to take you two for a walk. I have a little surprise for you. You personally, I mean."

Jason nodded, concealing his interest well, and went to supervise the nightgowning of his sister. Ana waited to give Dulcie a good night kiss, and then she returned to her room. She had intended to join the evening meditation, now that Jonas had acknowledged her existence, but she felt weary and distant, and when she had to make an effort to exchange a few simple words with her next-door neighbor, she knew she could not bear the entire gathered community. She closed her door, jammed the chair under the knob, tugged the curtains as closed as they would go, and sat on the hard bed, her skin crawling with tiredness and a cold that did not come from the soft night. Too tired even for sleep, her body twitching with the day's tensions, she took out her diary and got to work.

She sat on her narrow bed with the covers pulled up to her chest, and she wrote. It began as a straightforward report like any of those she had submitted to Glen in the past, detailed and analytical, complete with maps and diagrams, but within a page or two it began to get away from her. Speculations began to intrude: her personal reactions became a necessary part of the explanations. There was, in truth, very little about this case that was straightforward, and the attempt to reduce it to analysis and point out the logical progress of her thoughts only served to make the lack of logic more obvious and her own position more tenuous, even desperate. As she wrote, she was aware of how personal she was becoming, how she was revealing not her competence as a trained investigator, but her feelings—claustrophobia and grinding anxiety, the upwelling of fears and memories, the sensation of impotence. (What is the female equivalent of impotence, Glen? she found herself writing. Hysteria? Well, I am both impotent and hysterical.) What she wrote was like nothing she had ever given Glen before, presenting details of her self and her life that she had never given anyone, not since Aaron had died, but here she was, her hand shaping letters that described just what Abby's face had looked like in death and how that vision kept intruding itself on her current choices and decisions. Even while she wrote, she was appalled at the intimacy of the document, fully aware that Glen would have no choice but to set it before countless others, but unable to stop herself from writing. The sensation of open communication was a lifeline to sanity, the words a catharsis that reached down to her bones. She told herself that she would destroy it when she finished, that she could write a second, expurgated version for Glen, but she knew she would not.

Lights-out came and an officious passerby tapped at her door, so she turned out her lamp and opened the curtains to write by the light of the compound floodlights. She wrote until she had it all down, up to the point of what she planned to do next, and as she was thinking about that she fell asleep.

She woke some hours later, her diary jabbing her cheek and the floodlight shining in her eyes. Her bladder was also protesting at the number of cups of tea she had drunk, so she removed the chair from under the doorknob and went down the hall to use the toilet and brush her teeth. When she got back to her room, she saw the diary lying openly on the pillow, and she closed the door and cautiously tore out the incriminating pages. The only place she could think to hide them was inside the sole of her Chinese slippers; she folded the pages over and over and pushed the long rectangle in between the cloth lining and the sole. Not ideal, but as a temporary hiding place, as good as she could do.

She put her head back onto the pillow, and was asleep.

Ana's day began two hours later, long before the birds had begun their dawn chorus, when her bedroom door was flung open and a man's voice began talking at her. She went from deep sleep to heart-pounding panic in a split second, whirling around in the tangling covers and bruising her elbow on the wall before she was upright and blinking at the door. It was Jonas.

"What?" she croaked.

"What is wrong with you? I said I'm not going to need you during the day, I'm working on some calculations, but I may want you tonight. Be available. Listen for my call. You know how to get there?"

She sat up more fully, scratched her scalp to encourage brain activity, and said, her sarcasm half swallowed up by a yawn, "I think I can find it again, Jonas."

He stepped back and was gone. After a minute she climbed out of bed and closed the door. The sarcasm that she had let slip was not a good sign, but she was, after all, fast asleep, and it was annoying to be credited with barely enough brains to walk downstairs to the Bear's den.

Her eyes went to the diary on the bedside table. After a moment, she took it up and turned to a clean page.

Glen—I fully intend to watch my step, take care, and all the rest. For the first time in many long years I can honestly say that I do not want to die. Realistically, though, things happen. You and I both know that. We"ve known it since the day you planted your finger on the doorbell of my apartment fifteen years ago.

I should have died eighteen years ago with my husband and daughter. I did not. I have finally come to accept that, thanks in no small part to you, and to think that maybe the years between my should-have death and my actual one have been good for something. God's will is not a phrase I care to use, but there is a fate, Glen—a divinity, as Shakespeare calls it—and it does shape our ends.

My fate was to meet Jason and Dulcie. If it brings my end, if a thing happens to me in the next week or two, it will have been worth it. All I ask is that they be kept safe.

I ask it of God, and I ask it of you. I've never asked you for anything, Glen, not even an explanation. I am asking this. Keep those two children safe for me.

—Anne

She tore out the page and folded it up, and was beginning to slip it into the shoe, when she paused to run a hand over the rubbery skin of her face, then smoothed out the page and took up her pen again.

P.S. Sorry about the maudlin sentiments—I haven't slept much recently and my brain is a bit fried. If I can't e-mail this to you in the next two days, I'll find the village post office or a nice friendly helmeted constable riding his wide-tired bicycle down a country lane and send it to you that way. Not to carp, Glen, but you better hurry. There's not a lot of time here.

P.P.S. Oh, and Glen? I hope you're planning to invite me to your wedding. If you don't, I plan to turn up anyway and really embarrass you.

—A

She smiled as she folded the page into the slipper. As she set off in the direction of the early-morning coffeepot, she detoured to take her revenge on Jonas's followers by yanking the pull chain on the antique and incredibly noisy toilet.

She spent the morning happily and mindlessly scrubbing floors, and after lunch joined Jason and two other American students for a brief but productive meeting with Dov and one of the other teachers. Jason, blase as he had been, found it difficult to take his eyes off the lumpy sack she had brought into the room.

After the meeting they gathered up Dulcie from the kindergarten room (where she sat listening carefully to a wildly chattering friend) and Ana led them out through the kitchen and across the yard to a flat, paved area that was used to park the farm tractor during the rainy season. She had spent the hour before breakfast sweeping away the dirt and hanging up a circle she wove from a roll of baling wire. Jason stood with his hands on his hips, puzzling out the odd markings, and when he turned and Ana bounced the ball off the rough concrete and into his hands, a look of pure, uncontained pleasure lit up his face. He dribbled the ball a few times to get the feel of the surface, then circled around, took three fast steps, and shot it neatly through the lopsided hoop.

"I thought they didn't play basketball here," he said.

"Does that look like a regulation hoop? They don't—well, not many of them. I brought the ball with me."

That stopped him short. "You brought the ball in your—oh. Duh. You let the air out first."

"I thought I was going to have to blow it up with my mouth like a balloon. Sara found me an old pump in the tool shed."

So she and Jason and little Dulcie played basketball, undisturbed and undistracted by the adults and children who came to investigate the odd noises. She blocked him, he dodged her, and Dulcie ran after them both, shrieking in joy. Twice Jason lifted his sister up so she could dunk the ball down through the makeshift and increasingly asymmetrical hoop. The third time Dulcie dunked it, the hoop came down. Dulcie felt terrible, but Jason only laughed.

Ana retrieved the mashed hoop. "I think this design needs some work," she said, putting it into the sack with the ball. "But now, I want to take you two for a walk."

She took a smaller sack out of the lumpy one, threaded the handles up over her shoulder, plunked obedient hats on all three heads, and led the two children down the road to the east of the house. The sparking air was rich with the fragrances of mint (from Dulcie, whose class had worked in the herb garden) and roses, lavender and cut grass, and the clean smell of sweat from the boy at her side.

The abbey was not quite as impressive when approached from the direction of cultivated land, but it was still a place of calm loveliness, even to a five-year-old child and a fourteen-year-old boy.

"It used to be a church," she told them. "Four hundred years ago it was part of a monastery; you can see the outline of the walls. That lumpy ground over there was probably the monastery itself, where the monks lived and worked."

They walked up and down, investigating the vague shapes beneath the turf, and then went into the space between the abbey walls and up to where the altar stone peeped out of the grass. There she laid out her picnic of cheese sandwiches and juice and three large and somewhat travel-worn cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookies that she had bought at the airport in Phoenix. She gave them each a packet of broken pieces, keeping for herself the one that had been completely pulverized.

They ate their open-air meal, and after they had finished she lay back on her elbows, watching surreptitiously as the two children explored the crumbling walls and ran their fingers over the time-softened carvings. It was a new sensation for Jason to be valued, she decided, first by Steven and now by Jonas. The approval of the two male authority figures and the complete change in setting had continued to work their magic on him. He looked younger and more nearly content than she had seen him, and it was like a knife in her heart to know that if she had anything to say in the matter, it would not last. Jonas would be revealed as a dangerous lunatic, Dierdre would go back home with her parents, Steven's school would be smashed, and these two children who in a few short weeks had taken control of her thoughts and her affections, would be farmed out again to the chance protection of foster homes.

And all that only if she was very lucky.

The sun grew low in the sky, and eventually she stirred and began to gather up the papers and bread crusts. "Thank you," she told them. "I can't remember when I had a nicer afternoon."

"Thanks for the basketball," Jason said. "That was cool."

"Even though I broke the hoop," said Dulcie.

"It can be fixed," Ana said.

On the way back to the house Dulcie alternately lagged behind and raced ahead. On one of these surges Ana drew a breath and let it out slowly.

"Jason," she said,"there's a couple of things I need you to know and then forget unless you need them. And I have to ask you not to say anything about either of them to anyone, not for, oh, maybe two or three months. It is extremely important to me that you particularly not tell Jonas what I'm about to say. I realize this isn't fair to you, keeping a secret from someone like that, but if he or Steven found out, I could be in big trouble. I'm asking you to trust me. Will you?"

After a while he said, "Okay."

"Promise?"

"I said I would," he said testily.

"Thank you. Two things. If anything happens here, if there's a raid or someone appears with a gun or we have an earthquake—no, come to think of it, they don't have earthquakes in England. Anything major and confusing anyway, I want you to promise me you'll grab Dulcie and get her away from the house. Take her to the abbey, or the woods. Don't try to find me or Jonas or your friend Dierdre or anyone, just grab Dulcie and run."

"What's the other thing?"

She took a deep breath and let it out. "I have a friend, an old friend, who works for the FBI. Yes I know, it seems unlikely, doesn't it? Anyway, his name is Glen McCarthy. If you're ever in real need of a friend yourself—years from now, even—get in touch with Glen. He owes me big. Mention my name and he'll help you."

Jason studied the trees for a minute. "I thought you were a friend."

"I am, of course I am. But things happen, and I'm sometimes hard to find. With Glen, every small town in the United States has an FBI branch office, practically, and a lot of other places as well, like London in this country. And who knows," she added under her breath, "you might even like him."

"Glen McCarthy and take Dulcie into the woods. And I'll forget them both unless the roof falls in."

"Thank you, Jason." She stopped and turned to study his young-old face, the hawk nose and dark eyes and shorn hair. She noticed suddenly to her surprise that his was not actually a handsome face, just compelling. She reached up impulsively and rested her palm for a moment on his check. "I wish—" She stopped, and looked down past the crook of her elbow to see Dulcie gazing up at her.

"What are you wishing, Ana?"

Ana removed her hand and bent down to look Dulcie in the face. "I was wishing that I could take you both right this minute to an ice cream parlor I know in Portland, Oregon, where they make their own ice cream and serve it in giant bowls with paper umbrellas on top, and we'd order pizza ice cream for dinner and green pea sherbet for our vegetables and chocolate pistachio cream pie ice cream for dessert."

Dulcie giggled. "Pizza ice cream? Yuck."

"Where's your sense of adventure?" Ana chided. "Sancho Panza would eat pizza ice cream. Even Don Quixote might."

As they walked back to the house through the shimmering afternoon, Ana allowed herself to open up to the pleasure of their companionship and to treasure the small, glittering gift of their affection. We do not deserve to come to this thy table, Lord, she thought. The tender mercy of communion with these two may have been undeserved, fragile, and based entirely on her own deception, but it was nonetheless real, and none the less warming.

The sensation of comfort did not survive three steps beyond the kitchen door. The entire household appeared to be gathered there, all of them shouting at one another. Ana stopped abruptly and escorted her two countrymen back outside.

"It looks like dinner's going to be late," she told them. "Why don't you guys go in the side door and get some schoolwork done."

Jason had no objection to being spared the turmoil that lay inside, but Ana watched them start around that house with a fervent wish that she could join them. Instead, she walked back into the kitchen, where she found near the door a distraught-looking Vicky, the woman who had met them at the airport.

"What on earth has happened?" she asked. Vicky stared at her as if she'd just enquired what was going on at Pearl Harbor.

"They're taking our kids!"

"What, all of them?"

"No, of course not," she said sharply. "Though they're going to try, you watch."

"Who's 'they'?"

"Social Services," Vicky spat out, and it all began to make an awful sense.

Back in Arizona, Ana had heard of a custody battle between one of the Change members and her ex-husband who was trying to remove their son from the community. Now, it seemed, another battle was brewing, over nearly identical circumstances, only this time there were four children involved, the eldest of whom was actually a stepson, but adopted by the man when he married the boy's mother seven years before. Now he wanted them all out of Change, and that afternoon, while Ana was sitting in the sunshine admiring the abbey ruins, a social worker had arrived clutching four Emergency Assessment Orders, with a brace of large constables to enforce them. The kids were removed for the compulsory seventy-two-hour observation period, the mother packed a bag and followed them, and Change was in an uproar.

Ana studied all the faces in the room, one at a time, looking for the too-familiar signs of desperation and outright panic such an event could set off. She saw a lot of anger, a universal sense of frustration, some misery and fear, but the only face she saw that was white and pinched with distress was that of a young woman whom she knew to be under such a threat herself, a single mother barely out of her teens whose parents were trying to pry their grandchild loose from Change. Ana began to breathe again, for what seemed to be the first time since entering the room. What had happened was bad but not catastrophic. Nothing was going to happen to Change tonight because of it.

The same thought seemed to occur to the others as well. One by one they turned away from their collective outrage to resume their life. One woman shot a glance at the clock and turned, tight-lipped, to drag a clattering armful of pans from a cupboard, while two others simultaneously opened refrigerator and onion bin. Two men set off into the house, still hashing it over at the tops of their voices, while another yanked open a corner drawer and snatched up a long white plastic apron and a wickedly sharp knife. Ana eyed him nervously as he started for the door, but Cali, the woman at the stove, called out, "Peter, you don't have to do that now. Leave it for the morning,"

"Got to eat," he grumbled, and marched off. Ana, reassured that he was not about to turn the blade on himself or others, quickly washed her hands and began chopping vegetables for an improvised raw salad to go with the rice and the beans that had been started before the Social Services invasion had thrown the kitchen into a state of confusion.

Twenty terse minutes later the rice was cooked, the salad assembled, and Ana was starting through the kitchen with a full tureen of red beans and sausage in her hands when the air was split by the bloodcurdling shriek of a soul in mortal terror. Dierdre dropped a glass into the sink and Cali jerked and sliced open her finger, but on Ana the effect was disastrous. A gallon of half-liquid beans hit the floor and erupted in a spicy shower over every surface. Beans spattered the ceiling, scalded exposed flesh, dripped down the walls, and covered the floor; in the midst of the carnage stood Ana, hands out, gaze far away, her body gone rigid as stone.

"She's having a fit," said a voice.

"Don't let her swallow her tongue," someone else contributed, but Ana did not hear them. She was not there. She was eight years distant and ten thousand miles away, standing in another kitchen with gingham checks on the windows and the hot Utah sun beating down outside, with the squeal ringing in her ears of a terrified blonde teenager named Claudia being dragged through the dust by an enraged spiritual leader, knowing that she was about to be locked into the stifling padded closet he used for the purpose of enforcing discipline. It was this sound that crystallized Anita Well's decision to get out, now; this sound that led to her key in Rocinante's ignition, her foot on the accelerator, her quick glance in the side mirror to see Calvin the cook through the billowing dust, raising his automatic pistol at her; this same shocking, high human shriek of protest and pain that set into motion the events that ended in Calvin's gun and the incomprehensible violation of her own pain, and two miles down the road the slow, inevitable collision with the jumble of boulders that rose up before her, all set off by the loud series of furious animal squeals that were coming from the Change barnyard.

Ana looked down at her feet, where the pieces of the crockery tureen were still rocking, and she began to shake. Dierdre, pretty young Dierdre with the golden hair like young Claudia's, began to gather up the pieces. Someone else—Vicky?—was speaking in an urgent and worried voice right in Ana's ear. Ana pushed the voice away and bolted for the small washroom just inside the back door, where Vicky found her retching violently into the toilet.

When nothing was left for her body to get rid of, Ana sat back on her heels, gasping and shivering.

"Are you okay?" Vicky asked for the tenth time. This time Ana responded.

"I'll be fine. What the hell was that noise?"

"Terrible, wasn't it? Peter's usually pretty good at sneaking up on the animals so they don't know what's happening, but I guess the pig saw him coming. Pigs aren't stupid."

"A pig. Christ."

"It doesn't happen very often, honestly it doesn't," Vicky told her earnestly. "Almost never,"

"I could see why you wouldn't want that every day. The kids must be freaking out," At least the room shared by Dulcie and Jason was on the far side of the house. They might even have missed it entirely. She gave a last shudder and got to her feet, which reassured her attendant into stepping back and leaving her alone.

She splashed her face, rinsed her mouth out, and stood with her head bowed over the small hand basin for a minute, waiting for equilibrium to set in. She took a few slow breaths and raised her face to the mirror, and then she did lose control, well and truly.

Her face was the only clean thing in the mirror. Her hair was a red-brown cap plastered against her head. Her once-yellow T-shirt was mostly the same brown color, dotted with individual kidney beans, bits of green pepper, and one slice of sausage lodged in a fold. Her legs were brown, her feet indistinguishable from her sandals, and her skin felt as if she had a sunburn beneath a drying mud pack. She was a sight.

The women in the kitchen looked up at her entrance, alarmed at the snorting noises she was emitting. Ana checked for a moment at the appearance of the room, but then she caught sight of three beans nestling on the top of Dierdre's head, and she doubled over in uncontrollable hilarity.

The giggles spread, until the kitchen and a rapidly growing audience were deep in half-hysterical laughter, gales of it that were renewed at each new discovery of the scope of the disaster. Ana finally had to leave, staggering brown and sticky upstairs toward the bath. She did not know if she wanted to share her colorful state with Dulcie and Jason or to hide it from them, but the choice did not come up, and she was soon safely locked in the bathroom with the water running.

After dinner, she joined the group meditation for the first time. She found it strangely disappointing, a colorless round of chanting and silence followed by a flat sermonette by Marc Bennett. The brittle edginess of the community was neither increased nor dispersed by the hour spent in the hall, but it lay under their actions and was resumed at the door when they left.

Ana spotted Sara coming out and went over to talk to her. After asking about the condition of the baby cabbages and confirming what Sara had heard about the disaster in the kitchen earlier, she tipped her head back toward the meditation hall and commented, "I'd have thought that Jonas would lead the meditations."

"He used to a lot, but not in the last few months. Which is fine," Sara admitted, lowering her voice, "because his meditations were getting a little… confusing. He's too lifted up for my little brain to follow. How are things going with you?"

"Fine," Ana told her. "Just fine."

She made her way upstairs and found Dulcie still awake, so she settled down with her and they read the remainder of the church mice story, as well as one of Ana's personal favorites, a book she had bought Dulcie in Sedona and which was already looking worn, the story of Ferdinand, the least testosterone-burdened bull in all of Spain. Ana then went back down to the kitchen to spend an hour scrubbing the cabinet fronts with a toothbrush and drink a cup of tea, and then she exchanged good-nights with the others and went back upstairs.

It was not until she was brushing her teeth that she remembered her midnight visit from Jonas. I'll come for you, he had said; be ready.

The last thing on earth she wanted was another session with the Bear, but there was not much she could do to avoid it. She sat in her room and tried to read the Jung book through drooping eyelids, until lights-out came and she decided that either Jonas had forgotten her in the heat of his calculations or he had been distracted and would send his summons when he damn well pleased. She might as well go to bed.

Still, she dressed for bed in clothes that could as easily serve as actual daywear, in case he crashed through her door again at two in the morning. She pulled on her better, light gray sweat pants in place of the dark blue ones with the hole in the knee, and a white T-shirt with the banana-slug logo of UC Santa Cruz on the place where the breast pocket would have been, and got into bed. After a while, she got up again and removed the folded diary pages from her slippers, putting them instead under the inner sole of her running shoes. Then she climbed under the covers and slid away into sleep.

Chapter Thirty

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield);

reproduction of the cuniumtio stage of the alchemical process from the Rosarium Philosophorum, Frankfurt, 1550

Jonas did not come crashing through her door.

Instead, she dreamed.

What came to her that night was not one of her usual innocuous dreams with emotional overtones, but a true nightmare, rare and vivid, and causing the fresh to creep. It was as if her mind were reminding her that the flashback she had experienced had not been healed by the laughter, only hidden.

She dreamed she was driving in a car with Abby, going home, and she decided to take a different route from the one they usually did. After all, what good was it to have a Land Rover if you couldn't take a muddy dirt road occasionally?

So they turned off the main road onto the mud track deeply surrounded by trees, and drove with the branches pressing close on the windows. Then they were walking, with that seamlessness of dream logic, still going home, heading down a stone passageway with a backpack resting between her shoulder blades and hiking boots on her feet, with Abby in front of her and other people behind, all of them everyday commuters like herself, going home. The walls of the passageway grew closer, the ceiling lower, and lower, until the tunnel was nothing more than a low horizontal gap in the stone.

Ana knew it was passable—not only for Abby, who had already vanished through the crack and gone before her, but everyone behind her seemed so matter-of-fact, she knew this must be a normal occurrence for them, just another part of the commute.

So she lay down onto her back, the pack cushioning the rock, and scooted along, feetfirst, into the gap. There was a distinct slope that made forward progress not only possible, but unavoidable, so she lay in the position of a luge racer, except with her arms stretched up over her head because of the low roof, and let herself slide down after Abby.

Only she did not come through the other side. Her boots caught on the roof of the gap, and she was stuck. There was no space above her body to allow her to turn her hips, so her knees could not bend and find purchase for her boots; there was no way to bring her arms down to push herself back up the slope, because the sides were too narrow. Her fingers could find nothing to grab onto above her head: she was trapped in the rock with no way to push or pull herself back up the slope, and she could hear the man behind her preparing to launch himself after her, but when she tried to draw a deep breath to call for help, the rock pushed down on her chest, and she could feel the horror of being enveloped rising up in her and—

She jolted awake, drenched in sweat and feeling the implacable pressure of the rock face pressing against her trapped boots and tingling up the front of her helpless legs. It was one of the most gruesome dreams she had ever experienced, and she had to get up and walk up and down, rubbing at the front of her legs before the sensation of entrapment left her.

There would be no sleep after that.

What she badly needed was either a long walk or a trashy novel, but she could not go out and she would have bet that such a thing did not exist under this roof. Instead, she sat down on her hard chair and opened her diary by the light of the floods, and forced herself to concentrate on an elaborate drawing of the abbey ruins.

After three botched efforts, the immediacy of the dream faded a little, and the drawing became easier. Eventually she turned to draw a boojum tree, and although it occurred to her that the mysterious snark might well live in a low gash in a rock tunnel, the image did not come to life, and she continued to draw lizards and rocks and even, thinking of Jason, a cat.

She was deep into her pointless labors when a small sound knocked her out of her artistic reverie, a noise both unfamiliar and disconcertingly reminiscent of some evil experience. She strained to hear over the sudden pounding in her ears, and waited for it to come again.

When the sound was repeated, she knew instantly why it had acted like a cattle prod on her distracted mind. She covered the distance to the door in two steps, yanked it open, and looked down at Dulcie, in pink-flowered nightgown and bare feet. She had her teddy bear in her arms, and she didn't look cold; other than that, it was all terribly familiar. She pulled the child inside and closed the door.

"What's the matter, Dulcie?" she said in a low voice.

"They took Jason again," the child whimpered. "He told me to be a big girl and go back to sleep, but I can't."

Ana shushed her rising voice and gave her a brisk hug. "That's fine, Dulcie. I told you to come here anytime, and I'm glad you did. Now, why don't you hop into my bed and see if you can follow Jason's advice?"

"Not Jason," the child said, obediently climbing up into Ana's bed.

"Jason didn't tell you to go back to sleep, you mean? Then who was it?"

"That man."

"Jonas? You mean Jonas came to get your brother?"

"With the loud man." Ana identified this second person without difficulty as Marc Bennett.

"That's okay," she said, though she feared it would not be. "We'll settle it like we did before. Now night-night."

"But where are you going to sleep?" Dulcie asked. Ana looked at the hard wooden chair and the hard wooden floor, and in the end she pulled up the blankets and got in next to Dulcie. The child curled up and snuggled into Ana with a grunt of contentment. Slowly, deliberately, Ana brought her arm up and wrapped it around the thin, warm body next to her.

"Ana?"

"Yes, Dulcie."

"I'm scared."

"What, because of Jason?" The wild mop of black hair nodded beneath Ana's chin. "Don't be, sweetheart. It's like before, he's gone to do some work, only this time it's with Jonas instead of Steven. Big boys have work to do."

"He was scared, too."

"Jason was?" Surprising, how normal her voice sounded, how little concerned, when her gut was clenched around a block of ice.

"He pretended he wasn't, but he was. I can tell."

"I'll bet you can."

"He was scared before, when Thomas and Danny came and got him," the child continued inexorably, the words pushed out of her by fear for her brother. "He was scared, and when he came back he wouldn't tell me what happened, but it made him have bad dreams, and Jason doesn't usually have bad dreams, not like me. And now they took him away again and he was even more scared than he was before."

She lay in Ana's embrace, waiting desperately for adult reassurance that it was going to be all right, and Ana struggled to find an answer to give her. She never lied to a child if she could possibly avoid it, and she did not want to lie to Dulcie now. For one thing, she knew how good children were at picking up unspoken messages, and she doubted that giving Dulcie any more reassuring words crossed with the pheromones of dread would help matters at all. On the other hand, it was cruel to burden a young person with adult weakness and doubt just when strength was needed most.

In the end, she gave Dulcie a squeeze and told her, "Dulcinea, I don't know what's going on either, but as soon as people are up and around, I'll find out. I'm with you, Dulcie. You're not alone."

That seemed to be the right approach, or at least one adequate enough to allow the child eventually to relax back into the safety of sleep.

Not the adult, though. There were no words reassuring enough to quiet the bone-deep trembling Ana could feel inside. Spiritual hypothermia, she diagnosed, striving for humorous detachment; optimal treatment to include a familiar woodstove, two dogs, and the warm company of friends. Although at this point she would settle even for Glen's icy presence—anything but to be there alone with deadly decisions before her.

She was jamming herself down between a rock and a hard place, to be sure, but she was also standing on a high wire, balancing over two abysses.

On the one side was Jason, who was a part of her in ways she could not begin to understand, and who at that moment, while Ana lay with the limp figure of his sister clasped to her, might well be staring at the dim interior of a second metal alembic—this time under the far from gentle protection of Marc Bennett and Jonas Seraph.

On the other side lay the massive responsibility she had for this community. The physician's oath to Do no harm was paramount in every aspect of the work she did with Glen. It infused her daily life, while in the communities she investigated, with the urgent need to tread lightly, to slip into a pre-set role and slip out again, leaving no trace. Her work for Glen had always been based on the idea that the long-term effect was the only goal, the larger good more important than the individual. In earlier cases, her heart had occasionally ached at the mistreatment, as she saw it, of the community's children or one of the adults who found himself to be a round peg faced with a square doctrinal hole, but she had rarely succumbed to the temptation to interfere, knowing that in the long run, Glen and his agency would sort it out. Uncomfortable and uncertain as she might be about Glen, when it came down to it, she trusted him. He would do what was needed.

Now the question was turned around on her. Jason's welfare was at stake here, and it appeared to demand an immediate and aggressive action that Glen was not there to provide. But could she trust her own judgment? The persistent intrusion of Anne Waverly's past and personality into the body and actions of Ana Wakefield, the increasing incursions of memory that had come to a head in yesterday's devastatingly real flashback, was confusing her. She was aware of a constant jittery anxiety focused on the two children, and she worried that Anne's frantic concern for the boy was severely hindering Ana's ability to remain the passive, open-minded individual she desperately needed to be. It was obvious to the rational side of her mind that she was well and truly losing it, hag-ridden by the specters of her past just at the time she most needed to be clearheaded and objective.

Long, long ago, when a thirty-one year-old Anne Waverly entered the university graduate program eighteen years before, she had begun by building a persona on the wreckage of her former life. She had paved over the rubble, sealed up the debris of catastrophe with the clear, hard shell of academic discipline. When that cracked a bare three years after it had been laid down, when the snapshot of Abby had rumbled through her and pitched her into the darker corners of her mind, what had dragged her out again was Glen, who happened along to use her and bully her and incidentally show her the way to survival: to split herself into two persons, one rooted in either side of the events of Texas, two individuals whose only point of joining was the bridge crossing into an investigation, and later leaving it.

Now that bridge was disintegrating, cracked in a hundred places, and the events of the past were welling up out of the dark abyss beneath her. Maria Makepeace, no doubt, would be jubilant, considering it a healing and whole-making event; to Ana it felt like being overtaken by birth pangs in a collapsing building. She had to control the process, just for long enough to get out and into safety. She simply could not afford it now. Jason and Dulcie could not afford it.

She must have tightened her grip on the child, because Dulcie stirred briefly, then subsided.

So, could she trust herself in this state? Her mind was urging caution and rationality, forcing her to admit that the individual threats she had seen here did not necessarily add up to the sort of desperate scenario her inner eye was putting together: An antagonistic attitude toward the authorities, a man in the woods carrying a shotgun, a titular leader who was thinly connected with reality, and a de facto leader who was overly full of himself. That was it. Everything else came from her and her strange ties to two children, and all of it was tainted by her own past. Dulcie reminded her of Abby—that was where the cracks had begun. And then Bennett looked like Martin Cranmer, and the woods made her nervous, and by the time the pantry and the communal phobia about outsiders entered into the equation, she was so sensitized to parallels that a particular brand of pencil would take on an ominous significance. She had no business being there, no right to jeopardize everything by making decisions that could be based only on irrationality. The best thing for everyone would be if she were to stand up and walk away from the compound.

Leaving behind Jason in his alembic.

Abandoning Dulcie to strangers.

They would survive, her mind insisted. They would be fine.

But her gut, her heart, her every instinct cried out that here and now, the rational decision would be the wrong one, that the long-term goal was just too far away. There were times when the expedient solution was not the right one, when only faith justified an action—educated and open-eyed faith if possible, but if that failed, blind faith would have to do.

There was, in truth, no choice to be made.

The deep trembling had subsided while she wrestled with her demon, and with that final realization, that a decision had made itself, she actually drifted into sleep for a while, free at last of the tension of being of two minds. When she woke, the harsh blue glare of the floodlights pressing at her curtains had given way to the gentle rose light of dawn, and she was not the same person who had lain down on this bed the night before.

"My name is Anne Waverly," she whispered into the room. For better or for worse, Ana was gone, and when she went to the toilet down the hallway and moved to the sink to wash her hands, she half expected to see a woman with hair curling onto her shoulders. Instead, the same crop-haired woman looked back at her, although her eyes were calm and her face seemed older. She looked… satisfied.

Back in her room, Anne exchanged her sweat pants for jeans, took out a plain T-shirt for the upper half, and then thrust that back into the drawer and took out the small buckskin medicine pouch she had been forbidden to wear. She dropped it defiantly over her neck, and then pulled on a high-collared polo shirt to conceal the cord.

The sound of the drawer closing woke Dulcie, who sat up, blinking.

"Ana, are you going to find Jason?"

"We're going to get you dressed, and then we'll have breakfast, and then you're going to the schoolroom—no, today is Saturday, isn't it? Well, we'll find something for you to do, and after that yes, I'll go and see if anyone knows about Jason. But, sweetie, I think it would be best if you didn't say anything about Jason to anyone else for a little while. Some of the work that people do is kind of private, and they might not think it was a good idea if I tried to find out what Jason is doing. Okay?"

Dulcie nodded solemnly. One thing her past had taught her was the importance of not blabbing to adults.

Dressed and scrub-faced and downstairs with their bowls of muesli, Anne spotted Sara and led Dulcie over to her table. Introductions were made and the topic of the weather disposed of, and then Anne asked Sara about her plans for the day. The dining room was noisy and Anne, sitting next to Sara, pitched her voice low. Dulcie, concentrating on slicing a banana for her cereal, did not even look up.

"I'll be working in the runner beans most of the day," Sara told her. "You know, down near the stream?"

Anne nodded; the field was at the far end of the clear area from the house, an ideal place for Dulcie today. Keeping her voice low, she said to Sara, "I wonder if you'd mind having a small helper for the morning? I have to do some Work, but I should be finished by lunch." One way or another, a quiet voice in the back of her head added. "She's a good little girl and I'm sure she wouldn't be any trouble,"

"Sure, no problem. I'd be happy to have someone help me weed. Dulcie," she said across the table, "do you know the difference between a baby bean plant and a weed?" Dulcie shook her head doubtfully and Sara laughed. "That's quite all right, dear. It's a skill many adults haven't mastered either, but something tells me you'll catch on in a flash. Finish your breakfast, my dear, and then we're off to rescue the runner beans from the weeds. See you at lunch, Ana,"

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 and carried them into the kitchen. Dierdre 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 Dierdre 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 Dierdre to take herself down to the bean field with Sara for the day, anything but staying in this brick monstrosity where anything might happen. Dierdre 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 on to 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 Call 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-haired 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: to 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 dosed 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, rhythmical 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.

She sat back against the wall with a thud. It took a moment for her mind to get around this image of Jason, it was so absolutely unexpected. She had been operating since the early hours under the assumption that for the second time in three weeks, Jason was trapped, sweltering and alone, inside a Change alembic. She had struggled and come to the decision that she had no choice but to sacrifice herself, Glen's investigation, and very possibly the lives of everyone here in the drive to free him, when all the time he was sweating not inside an alembic, but over one. She rested her head back against the stone wall and laughed silently until the tears ran down her face. Here she was, tiptoeing around like a criminal, pumped full of adrenaline, preparing to offer herself up for Jason's salvation, only to find him laboring away like an obedient young idiot over a fraudulent transmutation of matter. The sense of anticlimax would have been devastating had it not been so hopelessly funny.

Still, she reflected more soberly, Jason did not look very happy, and Dulcie would be waiting. Perhaps she could still save Jason some anguish and break up the uneven little triad in the next room. She got to her feet to go back down the corridor and upstairs to the kitchen, where like any good British housewife she prepared a tray with a pot of tea and a bowl of cookies—biscuits, she corrected herself, very nearly humming under her breath. One of the men came in while she was filling a jug with milk. He nodded at her, and ran more water into the kettle. She nodded in return and picked up the tray, walking openly through the door to the cellars. Three people saw her; no one stopped her. At the foot of the stairs she pulled open the middle door and walked in. She followed the right-hand passage this time, and without pausing she strode straight into the laboratory.

"Anyone fancy a cup of tea?" she said brightly. Marc Bennett leaped backwards at her sudden appearance, sending the stool flying until it tangled with his feet and brought him down with a crash and an oath. Jonas's reading was interrupted at the phrase "spiritual fire"; he yanked off his half-glasses and glared at her with thunder gathering on his brows. Jason broke off his work at the bellows, tried to straighten up, and instead went down on one knee with a brief cry that was instantly clamped back inside his lips. Anne took one glance at the agony on his face as the extent of his pain made itself felt, and then she swept in, set the tea tray down on the scarred, cluttered wood of the laboratory table between an astrolabe and a tall object draped in a pristine white cloth, and prepared to pour the tea.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Bennett shouted at her, extricating himself furiously from the long-legged stool. "How the hell did you get in?"

Anne faltered, the teapot in one hand and a saucer in the other. "I thought you'd like a cup of tea," she repeated, sounding confused. "Dulcie told me that Jason was doing his "Work", so I figured you'd be down here somewhere, and the door was open, so I just came in. Why? Shouldn't I have?"

"I locked that door," Bennett declared angrily.

"Well, someone left it open."

"I locked it!" This time he looked to Jonas in appeal, but the big man just shrugged. "I did!"

"All right, so you locked it," Anne said, sounding like a mother soothing a petulant child. "But it unlocked itself and when I tried the knob it opened. Now, do you want some tea?"

"But you can't interrupt a Work!" he protested. He sounded as if he was about to stamp his feet in frustration.

"Oh, I'm sorry. You mean you don't take any breaks at all?"

"You know the rules."

She set the teapot down with a bang and turned on him indignantly. "Well, actually, no, I don't know the rules. I've been with Change for more than six weeks and the only things I know about the Work of Transformation are what I've figured out by myself. Now, shall I take this back? You may have been sitting on your stool all morning, but the boy looks nearly done in."

"Maybe she'd like to work the flames for a time, Marc," suggested a deep voice from behind her. "If she's so concerned for the boy's welfare."

"But that's not—"

"I know," Jonas said. "But nothing else about Ana is usual; why should this be? Jason, show Ana what to do."

The boy peeled himself off the wall and bent to his task with a groan between his teeth. She left the men to their refreshments and went over to the stifling heat of the furnace.

"How long have you been at it?" she asked him.

Jonas answered. "He has been at his Work for six hours, and he will manage another six, with your help."

Anne bit her lip and studied the process, which involved the slow, steady depression and lifting of the handle of a large fixed bellows, its nozzle aimed at the low brick furnace filled with charcoal. The alembic in the top was about eighteen inches high and had some unidentifiable blackened mass inside. The tube that ran through its stopper ended in a container of water, where it bubbled occasionally with escaping gasses. She waited until she had the rhythm right, and then she stepped up next to Jason and put her hand over his on the bellows handle. He kept his grip for two beats and then he pulled his sweat-soaked body away and let her work.

It was a hellish position, stooped and slow. In ten minutes her arm was numb, after twenty her shoulder burned from scalp to hip. She shifted arms, worked for another quarter hour, and then Jason took over again.

It was a long, long day. Jonas resumed his reading aloud, Marc perched on a replacement stool and climbed down from time to time to add charcoal to the fire or make minute adjustments to the alembic, the contents of which seemed to change not at all. Jason's unspoken and guilty gratitude each time she took over was all that kept her going. Even with his youth, his muscles had to be screaming every bit as much as hers. The phrase "sweat meditation" floated into her mind, though she could not remember where it came from, and she would probably have continued with the pointless, hypnotic labor until she collapsed into the fire had Jonas not suddenly stood up, slapped his book shut, and declared, "The stage of calcination is at an end, and our material must rest before the Work is resumed. You have done well."

He moved to the workbench and snatched up the white cloth, revealing a tall, elegant glass pitcher and a matching glass. He filled the glass with water from the pitcher, picked up one of the teacups and dashed its dregs to the floor, then poured water into that, too. He carried cup and glass over to where Jason stood bent over and Anne sat against the wall, and presented her with the cup and Jason with the glass. When they had drunk the water, he took back the two vessels and put them next to the pitcher, and draped the cloth back to cover them. Marc Bennett had come around the table and was whispering furiously in his ear, but Jonas waved Bennett away and came back to stand over them, saying ceremonially, "It is time to cleanse ourselves and to take food again, and to practice the discipline of silence to those who have not seen our Work. Ours is a secret Work, about which nothing is revealed. You have done well," he repeated, and that seemed to be the end of the liturgical blessing, because Bennett leapt in again and insisted, "But she hasn't been cleansed and she hasn't taken her vows. You can't just turn her loose."

Anne narrowed her eyes, not liking the sound of that, but Jonas just threw up his hands.

"All right, Marc, do what you have to. But remember, I told you, Ana isn't following the usual Work here."

Which statement did not please Marc one bit. Still, it did seem that they were to be allowed upstairs once she had taken whatever vows were required; poor Dulcie would be overjoyed.

They followed Jonas down the stone passageway to the outer door with Bennett bringing up the rear. They paused to watch him lock the door, and when he straightened and looked meaningfully at Jonas, Anne braced herself. Bennett marched over to the door of Jonas's washroom, drew it open dramatically, and told her to go in.

"What? No, I'm not going to—"

"Ana," said Jonas. "Go."

She looked from one man to the other, but could read no threat in either of them. Bennett might be looking forward to teaching her a spiteful lesson, but it would not go beyond that, and Jonas, inscrutable as always, nonetheless seemed to be on her side. She did not want to be locked in that small space, but she had to admit that her nervousness did not justify frightening the boy by making him witness a doubtless futile struggle. She dredged up a smile. "Don't worry, Jason," she told him. "I seem to have gone about things backward, so I can't go upstairs until I've been through the starting rituals. It'll be okay. Go and find Dulcie—she'll be biting the carpets, wondering where we both are."

To save him from having to protest, she stepped forward into the small bathroom, then heard the key turn in the lock. Footsteps and voices faded as she examined the close space; with her luck lately, she thought in disgust, they'd forget all about her until Jonas needed to pee. And no doubt the ceremony was something that couldn't begin until midnight.

Still, there was plenty of water to quench her raging thirst, and a toilet, and she had gone without meals before. The water in the tap even ran nice and hot, and she set about cleansing her body, if not ritually then certainly in fact. In exploring the cupboards, she was pleased to find a bottle of aspirin with codeine, which made movement of her stiffening shoulders more bearable, and a cache of thick towels to cushion the floor.

She should have been so exhausted that she would welcome sleep, even in the cramped setting, but sleep would not come. Her muscles refused to relax, her mind leapt and skittered at every small noise, her eyes would not focus on the books of erotica even when the print was large enough to read without glasses. Her body wanted to throw itself noisily at the door, kicking and screaming, and her fingernails itched to peel away at the crack until they could insinuate themselves into the opening. Her lungs even tried to insist that they were low on air, that she was dizzy with lack of oxygen, although she knew it could not be so. More than anything, she longed to pace like a caged beast, but she could take no more than two steps before being trapped by the shelves or the toilet. It was all a part of their absurd alchemical ritual, she told herself again and again. Once she had expressed the proper awe and submitted herself to their masculine authority, they would be satisfied and let her go.

Long hours crept by. The noises of dinner built up overhead, feet slow and quick, heavy tread and the light patter of children. She found herself salivating like one of Pavlov's dogs when the sounds paused for the evening meal, and then the feet sounds resumed for the after-dinner chores. There was another pause during evening meditation, a lesser buildup of noise when that was finished, and finally all the noises faded away. The house quieted. Water, hot or cold, did nothing to satisfy hunger. The muscles of her shoulders and back burned in any position, and even the volumes of erotica lost their ability to distract after the first half dozen. She found herself eyeing the delicate Japanese pictures of couples (and more) coupling, wondering if the pictures were printed on edible rice paper.

She hadn't heard a footstep overhead for at least half an hour, which put it close to midnight, when a noise came from outside the door. Struggling stiffly to pull herself upright from her nest of towels, she waited, her heart racing. A single pair of heavy feet descended the wooden stairs; half a minute later a key scraped in the lock. The door opened. Jonas stepped back, allowing her to emerge.

His dark eyes studied her, looked in at the small room, and came back to her face. "Did you enjoy my library?" he asked he:.

She gaped at him. "Did I—? Well, no, to tell you the truth. Not under the circumstances. I didn't even have my reading glasses."

He nodded as if that were the only consideration, then asked, "Did you wash yourself?"

"Not very well, but—"

"That should do it, then."

"What?"

"Good night, Ana." He reached forward then, immobilized her head between his powerful hands, and bent to kiss her mouth, briefly but with a thoroughness so reminiscent of Aaron that it made Anne's scalp tingle. Before she could react, before she knew whether the tingle was lust or revulsion, the bearded mouth left hers. Then she felt his thick fingers enter the neck of her polo shirt to draw out the buckskin pouch and pull it over her head.

He picked open the drawstring top with surprisingly delicate fingernails and shook the contents onto the palm of his hand, turning them over curiously with one thick finger. The bead, tufts of fur from the dogs, stones, and bee pollen he funneled back into the pouch, but he took the silver crescent that she had bought in Sedona between two fingers and turned it back and forth, watching the light play across the low indentations of its beaten surface.

"The moon revels in the reflected glory of the sun," he mused. "In alchemical allegory, Luna reaches the height of her existence in her conjoining with the sun." He turned the pendant around again, and said, "Come."

She followed him reluctantly past the stairs that led to open air and back into his study. He went over to the strange collection of bones and objects at the third window, detached one item from the rest, and brought it back to her, displayed on his palm, its leather cord dangling down the back of his hand. It was the rough moon-shaped object she had noticed earlier, an elongated, worn silver nugget threaded onto a thong. He smiled to himself, the same private smile she had seen as he caressed the altarstone in the abbey ruins with his fingertips, and then he curled the thong around the moon shape and pushed it into the buckskin pouch and drew the bag shut.

"I'd like you to take that," he said. "It is… appropriate that you should have it."

Anne studied him, and asked slowly, "Why? Whose necklace is that?"

"It belonged to Samantha Dooley, who is no longer with us," he told her. "She did not, shall we say, live up to expectations."

Still smiling to himself, he tied the pouch snugly shut and dropped the cord back around her neck. He tucked the medicine bag inside her shirt and then tugged her collar up to hide it, a gesture that was somehow even more intimate than the kiss he had given her. "You may wear it," he said.

And then he walked out of his study and disappeared through the door to the laboratory.

Anne stood rubbing her hands across her mouth and scalp, trying to wipe away the tingle, to scrub away the taste of Aaron that Jonas had left behind, shocking, unexpected, and just too damn much, on top of everything else. She felt punch-drunk, and not only because of the painkillers she had swallowed. The past few days had been one long, deep plunge into the terror of her past ending with the abrupt euphoria of anticlimax, sleepless nights thinking she was balanced precariously over a bottomless abyss, only to discover that it was all a fake, constructed by tricksters and fed by her own dark imagination. All in all, it was more than she could deal with. She felt like a jigsaw-puzzle person scattered across the landscape, and she craved only to have Maria Makepeace standing over her, gathering up the pieces one by one and putting her together again. She wanted to go after Jonas and draw his mouth down onto hers. She wanted to vomit at the idea. She thought about dashing her head against the stone wall until she lost consciousness. She felt as if she would never be rational again. She felt as if she had just faced death and walked away again. She felt… she felt monstrously hungry, and would have killed for a cup of English tea.

She raided the refrigerator and gulped down a bowl of cold red stuff that looked like spaghetti sauce and tasted like Swedish meatballs, and followed it with a cup of scalding, strong tea. In the dim kitchen of the silent house, life seeped back. She palmed a couple more of the painkillers from the bottle in her pocket and swallowed them gratefully. She might even manage to sleep tonight.

She went upstairs, aware of the silence and of the simple well-being that food brought, conscious of the blessed goodness of life in spite of everything. The urge to walk away from it all was powerful, but she held the two children before her like a talisman, her still center in a maelstrom of threat and desire and confusion. Jason and Dulcie would be asleep, but she decided to take the long way around and lay the palm of her hand on their door in passing, a silent goodnight. Snores came from a few of the rooms, most were still, but when she got to the children's door, to her surprise she heard low voices coming from within. She tapped very lightly, and the room went instantly silent. She tapped again, and heard movement inside, and then the door cracked a couple of inches.

She started to put her mouth to the opening and say that she just wanted to wish them a good night, when the door flew back and Jason—taciturn, undemonstrative, cool and aloof Jason Delgado—lunged out and flung his arms around her. She grunted at the pain and he immediately let her go, but Dulcie squeaked "Ana!" and they hushed her and scurried inside the room, closing the door behind them.

In the end all three of them huddled together on one of the beds, Dulcie tucked in between them and fading fast.

"Are your shoulders as sore as mine are?" Anne asked him when Dulcie was limp.

"It's my back that kills me, when I bend over."

"Here, take one of these," she said, and tapped out a couple of the pills from the bottle. "If it doesn't help in an hour or so, take the other."

"Thanks." He reached for the half-glass of water next to Dulcie's bed, and winced at the movement. She put a third tablet down next to the one she had left on the table, just in case.

"So what did you think of all that?" she asked, very casually.

"I don't know. I mean, they're good people, but I've got to say, I don't understand half of what they're saying. And that alchemy stuff—it's weird shit."

Her heart sang even as he apologized for his language, and she reached over and squeezed his hand. "It's okay, Jason. We'll figure it out. Just give me a couple of days. Now, you get some sleep."

She stood up and moved to the door, where she paused for a moment to look down at Dulcie nestled in her bed and at Jason sitting on the edge of the other bed, bending stiffly to take off his socks. This might be the last time she was alone with them for days, weeks even. If she brought in the authorities (as she intended to do) and if they broke Change up (which they would), the truth of who she was and what she was doing here would be revealed to these two, and the trust of their relationship with her would be shattered.

Jason looked up, and frowned at the expression on her face.

"What is it?"

"Nothing," she told him. "My dear Jason, it's nothing at all. Sleep well. We'll talk tomorrow." She left the room and closed the door on the two children, blessedly unaware that there would be no tomorrow.

Chapter Thirty-one

page 2 of 2

Change: Are you sure you're okay, Jonas?

Seraph: I told you I was fine. Stop harassing me, Steven.

Change: Okay, okay. You just sound troubled, is all. Are you sure the Social Services thing is off your neck? I could come over and-

Seraph [shouting]: Steven! Enough!

[a silence]

Change: I'm sorry, Jonas. You know best, of course.

Seraph: And before you ask me, no the work has not progressed. But I think it shall, very soon. I think I've seen the problem. Your friend Ana showed me it, in fact.

Change: Oh, that's really great news, Jonas. I don't suppose you want a hand with keeping the fire hot? Like the old days?

Seraph [laughing]: No, Steven, I don't think that will be a problem.

Change: She'll be helping you, I suppose. Ana. The boy can't be that far along yet.

Seraph [laughing]: Ana Wakefield will indeed help me in the great work.

Change: The great work? Jonas, what are you going to do?

Seraph: I am going to perform a transformation, Steven.

Change: But what kind, Jonas? Jonas, what do you have planned?

Seraph: You're not listening to me, Steven. I told you. Transformation.

Change: Jonas, listen. You're not—

Seraph: I have to go now, Steven.

Change: Jonas, Look-I was thinking today that maybe it's time to go on that trip to Bombay we were talking about. I could phone…you know, and see if he could see us.

Seraph: Good bye, Steven.

Change: Jonas, wait! don't hang up. I need to—[connection cut]. Damn.

[end of transcription]

Excerpt from the transcription of a telephone conversation between

Steven Change and Jonas Fairweather (aka Jonas Seraph)

1:34 a.m., GMT, May 24, 199-

Anne Waverly continued upstairs to her own room, and to bed, and she drifted away into the first easy sleep she had found since getting on the plane. It was such a vast, earth-shaking relief to know that she was just plain nuts, to know that her poor twisted imagination had simply carried her away, to know at last that everyone was safe. Not least of all was the half-humorous satisfaction of knowing that after the mess she'd made of understanding Change, Glen McCarthy would never ask her to do another job for him, ever again.

She had thought Jonas Seraph capable of insane violence. However, now it appeared that the most violent act the Bear was interested in was a sort of Tantric union with her. His primary goal seemed to be convincing another generation of followers that they, too, could make gold. She had thought Jason locked inside an alembic; instead, he had been set the task of a medieval apprentice. She had even believed that Jason was converting to Change doctrine, but now—the joy of his phrase "weird shit" rang in her ears, and she slipped into sleep with a smile on her lips, allowing herself to wonder what the two Delgado children would make of Anne Waverly's silent cabin in the woods.

She slept, and the house slept, unaware that below in the depths, the signs and portents of the last day were coming together in the mind of Jonas Seraph, freeing the fiery serpents from their mortal bondage. He gloried in this Woman, in what she had brought him and what she would do for him, and he labored hard to finish the preparations for this last and greatest Work of his lifetime. After so many trials and failures, after the disastrous mistake of thinking Sami would be the moon to his sun, the silver to his gold, after so many petty deceptions of gullible minds for the sake of perpetuating the whole, all the years of seeing one Work after another go dead and dry, at last it was upon him. Sami had been a mistake. Her energies in the end proved insufficient, her dedication no match for his own. That last Work with her had nearly robbed him of his confidence, reduced him to a thing as dead as she. Not this time. Soon, very soon, the final Transformation would be his. Every so often he paused to look up through the narrow windows, until at last he saw what he knew would be there, waiting for him: a delicate crescent, the first night of the new moon. And it was good.

The house slept, the moon rose and faded, and then at two o'clock in the morning, the peaceful, dignified Victorian mansion seemed to exhale sharply. The heavy cough jolted the building from one wing to the other; it startled the birds from their nests, set the dogs to barking, and reached down through the thick layers of fatigue and drugs to jerk Anne Waverly upright. She did not know what had woken her, but she heard the dogs and after a minute became aware of a strange vibration in the air, a distant roar almost too low to register as noise. She thrust her bare feet into her shoes and opened her door. Down the hall she saw movement as another person stepped out of a door on the opposite side.

"Did you smell smoke?" the woman said tentatively.

"Oh, God," Anne cried in despair. "Call 911," she ordered, starting down the hall in the other direction. "I'll wake the kids."

"Nine one one?"

"The fire department," Anne shouted over her shoulder, and then drew a deep breath to bellow into the night the alarm of "Fire!"

She flew along the corridor and down the stairs, making as much noise as she could, banging on doors, shouting continuously. Others had heard or smelled the danger and were doing the same. Screams built, one door after another flew open, the occupants rushing toward the stairs and safety.

When she reached Jason and Dulcie's room, the hallway was filled with running adults and children and the door to their room was standing open. She wasted agonized seconds looking under the beds and checking the bath down the hall, but they were gone. She could only pray with her very bones they had heard the alarm and run outside with everyone else.

The old house was going up like the stack of tinder it was. No need for a bomb made of fuel oil and nitrate fertilizer when one had a century-and-a-half-old house kept dry by its radiators, Anne thought in a brief bolt of rationality before she returned to the impossible task of checking the rooms.

She found one child sitting upright and rigid with terror as the flames broke through at the end of the corridor and roared full-throated at them. Anne snatched up the girl and fled down the back stairs, feeling the house trying to come down on her head.

The night air was thick with ashes and smuts and the fire leapt and swallowed with nothing to stand in its way. Beneath the noise of the blast furnace, adults shouted and cried out, children wailed, dogs barked and howled wildly, and the horses in the field screamed out their terror. Anne thought once she heard a siren in the distance, but nothing came near, and none of the residents caught shivering in the dancing light had any way of knowing that some of the popping glass they heard was actually gunfire, as Change guards in camouflage suits, unaware of what was happening, took potshots at the emergency vehicles gathering at the gates.

Anne was more interested in the absence of the only two people who meant anything to her. She pushed her way frantically up and down through panicked clusters of people, demanding if anyone had seen the two American kids. She found Sara, who looked at her uncomprehendingly from beneath a bloody scalp wound, and Dierdre, who was herself unscathed, although the woman she was with, probably her mother, was curled on the ground clutching her leg, white-faced with pain. Neither had seen Jason and Dulcie. Some of the adults were gathering the children together at a distance from the buildings. Two women ran up with an armload of first aid kits they had retrieved from the Change vehicles, dodging three white-eyed horses that pounded through the yard and vanished, freed with the other animals from the burning barns. Men and women staggered up to the place of refuge laden with horse blankets, buckets of water, and a couple of highly unnecessary kerosene lanterns, but their paltry attempts at organization amid the maelstrom of heat and the battering confusion of noise and panic was like a nest of ants working dumbly to restore order as the ground was being uprooted around their heads.

Anne dodged through the chaos of running adults in night-wear, past clusters of terrified children, around strange heaps of possessions that had been rescued and then abandoned—a sofa, three closed suitcases, a bedsheet wrapped around a tangle of clothing and framed photographs—looking for Dulcie and Jason. The cacophony of noise beat at her, the heat was a blaring, monstrous force, the bright, leaping illumination alternating with black, stretched-out shadows created a surrealist vision from hell, and Anne would have given five years of her life for a single deep breath of cool, smoke-free air.

And still she could find no sign of them. She stood for a moment in the lee of a wide, scorched-smelling oak tree and tried to gather her thoughts. Other than the house, which possibility Anne's mind refused to consider, there was only one place they could be. She wiped the edge of her white T-shirt across her filthy face and prepared to turn her back on the moaning adults and the screaming children—only to be grabbed by the shoulders and shaken furiously by a maddened figure shouting and spitting in her face. It took a moment to see Marc Bennett beneath the soot and the distorting terror and fury, and to interpret his words as a demand to know where Jonas was.

Her own fury glared to meet his. She shook off his grasping hands and slapped him hard, and when he took a surprised step backward she leaned into him, ten inches shorter and ready to tear him to pieces.

"You stupid piece of shit," she spat at him. "Your beloved tin-pot god went nuts. He went and sat in your alembic and set the place on fire around him, to see if he could make himself immortal,"

"What are you talking about? What alembic?"

"The steel alembic you have in your basement. The one you use to lock boys in when they misbehave." God, she didn't have time for this. She tried to push past him, but he grabbed her right shoulder again and pulled her back to face him.

"You're the mad one here, you bloody woman. That's Steven's alembic you're thinking of. Now, where the hell is Jonas?"

Anne gaped at him, and her own hand came out to grasp his upper arm. The two of them stood as if they were hanging on to each other for support in the flaring, feverish light of the fire.

"Are you telling me you don't have an alembic?" she demanded.

"You think you know the first thing about us, all the high secrets, don't you? You don't know shit. We don't have an alembic for initiates. We don't need one. The whole place is an alembic." He freed his hand to gesture at the house, and she followed his fingers to see the stepped-up pear-shaped wall of the front of the house, now devoured in flames, and the chimneys at the top gathered together like a stem—or like a plug at the neck of a vessel. As she watched, one of the chimneys teetered, then fell away into the flames.

She swung her gaze back to his face, and when he saw her eyes, he tried to retreat. Her fingers dug in and held him.

"Where would Jonas go?" she demanded.

"What do you mean?"

"His 'power nexus&'—where is it?"

But she knew. Before Bennett opened his mouth, she knew.

"The abbey," he said. "But how—"

She seized him by the lapels of his striped pajamas and pulled his head down until his face was almost touching hers, all the fury and fear of the last weeks lying naked in her face. "If you go there, if you so much as stir from this place, I will rip off your balls and feed them to you."

She saw her string of brutal monosyllables hit home, saw the fear in his eyes telling her that he did not doubt that she was perfectly capable of carrying out her threat. Then she turned and ran, stumbling in the uncertain light and cursing the branches and thorns that caught at her, plucking at her clothes, tearing her skin and slowing her down. Away from the glare of the fire, the sky was growing light, and when she fought her way out of the woods and into the abbey clearing, the day was already there.

So were Jason and Dulcie. They were not alone.

Anne stood, gasping for breath and fighting for calm with streams of black ash and blood-red sweat running down her face, her once-light-gray running pants filthy and torn, her heart pounding from exertion. Seeing Jonas seated on the altar stone, one distant corner of her mind abruptly knew, with the sure revelation of a light going on, that Samantha Dooley had never left Change, that she had given her life to Jonas Seraph's search for Transformation, that her remains now lay beneath the stone that Jonas had patted so affectionately when he first showed his new partner this place.

She was barely aware of the knowledge. The whole of her vision was taken over by the sight of Jonas Seraph, sitting on the newly settled stone, a shotgun resting across his folded knees, its barrels pointed directly to where Jason sat, half turned away from Jonas, his arms wrapped protectively around Dulcie. Anne walked forward slowly, and Jonas saw her.

"You are late!" he shouted furiously. "The fire must be nearly out—I called for you an hour ago,"

Anne tore her eyes away from the two frozen children, and continued up the grassy aisle toward Jonas with her hands out at her sides, fingers splayed and palms down in the gesture of peace.

"I'm here now, Jonas, so you can let the children go,"

He did not seem to be listening; instead, he had begun to stare at her with what looked like reverence. "My vision," he breathed. "A woman in white with the sweat of many colors on her face, giving birth to the golden-haired man,"

"Let the children go, Jonas," she repeated. "They'll just be in the way,"

His focus shifted to her face. "Innocence is needed,"

"Two are needed, not four. I am the innocent here, and all the sacrifice you need,"

"I don't…" he wavered.

Anne took another step forward, talking calmly. "Jonas, the fire is past its peak. You must have the female for your male, the moon for your sun, the mercury for your sulphur. You need me, Jonas. Now or never,"

She reached down for the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head. She wore nothing underneath it but the lumpy buckskin medicine pouch between her breasts.

She kicked off her shoes and moved across the cool grass to stand directly in front of Jonas. Without hesitating, she shoved her thumbs into the waistband of her sweat pants, peeled them off, and dropped them onto the turf. Turning her head slightly to meet Jason's astonished eyes, she said, "Take Dulcie and run," and then she threw herself at Jonas.

Anne's final awareness was of gratitude. Jason ran, with Dulcie in his arms: it was not all in vain.

VII

Transformatio

transform (vb) To change in composition or structure;

to change in character or condition; cf. CONVERT

Procede we now to the Chapter of Exaltacion,

Of whych truly thou must have knowledge pure…

For when the Cold hath overcome the Heat,

Then into Water the Air shall turned be,

And so two contraries together shall meet,

Till either with other right well agree.

Chapter Thirty-two

From FBI documents relating to the Change case, Somerset compound Evidence photograph showing sketchbook belonging to Jason Delgado

At eight-thirty on that May morning the sun had been up for hours, slanting across the hills and fields of southern England, dispelling the dew from the rich grass and the flourishing hedgerows. The air was still, the leaves motionless, and neighboring farmers in their fields and barns only now began to pause and sniff the air, wondering if the slow-moving haze in the air might not be connected to those distant sirens that had awakened them during the night.

The trees around the brick shell that had been a Victorian manor house were scorched and withered from the heat. Those farther away were no longer green but gray, laden down with the dirty snow of ash. The air was heavy with the stink of burning things, timber and foam rubber, plastics and fuel oil, leather and flesh—although whether the flesh was human, animal, or both would not be known for many hours. And now a great number of combustion engines made their contribution, spewing fumes into the sweet May morning, all the petrol and diesel motors that had first trickled, then surged into Change as soon as the camouflaged guards had stood down. Police and fire personnel, ambulances and emergency communications vans, NCIS investigators with Social Services hard on their tail and the media left slavering at the gates to snatch photographs through the windows of the departing ambulances.

At eight-thirty on that magnificent spring morning, two more children came stumbling out of the woods. The boy wore a pair of running shorts, a once-white T-shirt, and one high-topped athletic shoe; the small girl had on a long flannel nightgown, filthy and torn, and her black hair was a wild mat of leaves and twigs. Both were shocked and footsore, badly scratched and caked in mud from their long, circuitous battle through the English jungle. They stopped at the edge of the clear ground, gaping at the incomprehensible sight before them. The girl whimpered, and the boy gathered her up into his arms and stood for a minute, studying the strangers.

Jason knew a cop when he saw one, even an English cop wearing a tweed suit, and although this was the first time in his life he had actually sought a policeman out, once he had chosen his man he did not hesitate. He adjusted Dulcie's weight in his aching arms and carried her up the drive toward the man, waiting at the tweed elbow until the man finished giving instructions to a pair of uniformed police constables.

"The bastard in the car, Bennett, knows where he is, but he's not telling. So have your men spread out, and for God's sake, be careful—he may be armed, too." When the two uniforms had trotted away, the man looked down at Dulcie and then quickly at Jason. "Is she hurt, lad? You need to take her over to that tent by the big tree, you see?"

"She's not hurt. Not much," he corrected himself at Dulcie's protest, and went on firmly. "There's a man with the FBI in the United States named Glen McCarthy. I really need someone to help me get in touch with him."

The man looked puzzled, and then to Jason's amazement he said, "I wish that was the hardest thing I had to do today." He raised his head and shouted across the yard, "Hey, McCarthy. There's one of your countrymen here, wants to talk to you."

Jason watched the approach of this mysteriously conjured figure of ultimate authority with a mixture of suspicion and awe.

"You wanted me?" the man asked in his American accent, and then took a closer look at the girl. "Dulcie?"

"Mr. York!" Dulcie cried. "What are you doing here?"

"You're Glen McCarthy?" Jason asked incredulously. "With the FBI?"

"That's me."

"Ana told me that if I—"

"Where is she?" McCarthy demanded.

"She's in the abbey."

"She's naked," Dulcie said, and let out a high-pitched giggle. Glen stared at her briefly before turning to Jason.

"Show me," he demanded.

Jason refused to move, just shook his head violently and cast a significant glance down at Dulcie.

"Oh my God," Glen murmured, and turned away with his hand across his mouth.

Jason looked around and spotted Benjamin and his mother. He led Dulcie over to them, dropped to his knees, and told her that she would have to stay with Benjie for a few minutes while he took Glen McCarthy to find Ana. Dulcie's lip trembled, but she allowed her brother to transfer her hand to that of Benjamin's mother, who picked up a blanket and wrapped it around Dulcie's shoulders. Jason went back to Glen.

"Okay," Glen said grimly. "Let's go." He looked around for the first policeman, and called, "Paul! Okay if we borrow a car?"

The tweed-covered arm waved its permission, but Jason said, "I don't think you can get there in a car."

The Land Rover took them most of the way, leaving them a five-minute walk to the abbey ruins. Glen strode across the uneven ground, torn between the habitual need to hurry toward the scene of any disaster and the deep knowledge that he really did not want to lay eyes on Anne Waverly's dead body.

She was there, naked, as Dulcie had said. She lay in a welter of blood across the still figure of a big, bearded man who appeared to have taken the main brunt of the shotgun blast that had downed them both. There had been a struggle, the boy Jason started to explain. His young voice broke, loosing tears of despair and self-loathing to run down his scratched and filthy face. Ana had tried to get the gun away from Jonas, and it went off. He should have stayed; he could have helped her. He should have put Dulcie down in the woods and come back to Ana, but the gun went off then, and they ran for help and got lost, and it was his fault, all his fault.

Glen knelt down next to Anne Waverly, less aware of the boy's words than he was of the cropped hair on Anne's head, the worn brace on her knee, and the unutterable tragedy of her pale nakedness. Some of the blood that covered her upper body was still bright red and wet. He settled his fingers automatically over her pulse, brushing aside a cord she had around her neck, knowing the search for life would be futile. He was so busy trying not to see her, that it was a full twenty seconds before his fingers gave him the message: she still had a pulse. It was thready, but it was there, and in that moment Glen's hands felt a faint movement as the naked, bloodied woman drew a tiny breath.

Glen shouted aloud and stumbled to his feet, fumbling cell phone with shaking hands. Anne Waverly was alive.

Thus here the Tract of Alchemy doth end,

Which (Tract) was by George Ripley Canon penn'd;

It was composed, writ, and sign'd his owne,

In Anno twice Sev'n hundred sev'nty one;

Reader! Assist him, make it thy desire,

That after Life he may have gentle Fire.

Amen.