A Darker Place Read online

  They went down the paved path through some winter-bare trees and past a small patch of lawn, and into another building designed by the same architect as the hall. The lecturer unlocked a door and they followed her in, and Gillian revised her speculations: If her recollection of academia was correct, this was not the office of a woman with reason to fear a lack of tenure. The room looked, in fact, like that of a high administrator or department chair, a corner office complete with Oriental carpet and wooden desk—although surely an administrator would not be surrounded by shelves sagging under the weight of books and piled high with untidy heaps of journals and loose manuscripts. The professor slammed her briefcase on the desk, dropped the keys she had just used into her jacket pocket, hooked her cane over the edge of the desk, and sat down.

  “Close the door, Glen.”

  McCarthy shut the door and settled into one of the three chairs arrayed in front of the desk. Gillian Farmer tucked the strap of her shoulder bag over the back of one of the other chairs, hesitated, and took a step forward with her hand out.

  “Gillian Farmer,” she said. “San Francisco Police Department.”

  The professor looked at the hand for a moment before reaching out to take it with her own. “Anne Waverly, Duncan Point University. And occasionally FBI. Glen, what are you doing here? I thought I was finished with you.”

  He did not say a word, but without taking his eyes from hers he reached inside his jacket and withdrew a thick, oversized manila envelope. This he laid softly on the wooden surface between them, allowing his fingers to remain for some seconds on the buff paper before he pulled his hand back. Anne Waverly tore her gaze away from his and stared at the envelope as if it might sprout scaly skin and rear up to strike her. When eventually she looked back at him, for the first time since she had seen them standing at the back of her lecture hall she gave them an expression, one that lay somewhere between exhaustion and loathing.

  “Get out of here, Glen.”

  He immediately stood up. “My cell phone number’s in there. Don’t wait too long to call—Farmer here has to get back to her caseload.”

  The two intruders left the office. McCarthy closed the door quietly behind them and strode off down the hallway.

  “So much for ‘whatever works,’” Gillian Farmer said when she caught up to him. Her mind was already moving toward what she could do next, now that Anne Waverly had turned them down. She did not have many options left: The thought of being forced to do nothing filled her with deep apprehension.

  “She’ll do it.” McCarthy sounded completely sure of himself.

  “For Christ sake, Glen, she threw us out of her office.”

  “She won’t be able to keep away.”

  “Oh, right,” she said sarcastically. “She sounded so enthusiastic.”

  “I didn’t say she’d want to do it. I said she wouldn’t be able to help herself.”

  2.

  FIXATIO

  fix (vb) To make firm, stable, or stationary.

  In which our Bodies eclipsed begin to fight…

  One in Gender they be and in Number not so,

  Whose Father the Son, the Moone truly is Mother.

  CHAPTER 2

  From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

  In the silence of their absence, Anne Waverly sat listening to the inner reverberations of the sound the envelope made sliding onto the surface of her desk. She had heard that ominous whisper before. Three times, in fact: twice when Glen had stood before her and put identical envelopes on this same desk, and once out in the desert when she had been sitting on a boulder and looked down to see a rattlesnake glide over the grit-covered rock inches below her boots. Anne’s hand reached down and, of its own accord, began to massage away the eternal ache in her knee.

  After some time, a soft rapping came from the door—a tentative noise, since all her students knew that Anne never closed her office door when she was inside. She took a deep breath, and her hand came back up to rest on the desk.

  “Come on in,” she called, and constructed a smile for the girl who appeared in the doorway. “Hello, Monica. What can I do for you?”

  Two hours later, Anne’s office hours were long over. The last students left, the last telephone calls were made, and around her she could feel the busy building settling into the doldrums of the dinner hour. Time to go home.

  Papers and a book for review went into the briefcase. Three folders were set aside to leave at the steno pool for typing. Anne got tiredly to her feet, took the thick woolen coat from the wooden hanger on the back of the door, and drew it on. She switched off the reading lamp on her desk, folded her glasses into their case and put it into her briefcase, and finally picked up the manila envelope that had waited at her elbow all afternoon.

  She stood with it in her hand, a study in indecision; she even went so far as to turn back to the door and lock it, preparatory to opening the envelope, but she changed her mind and dropped Glen’s offering into the briefcase with everything else, fastening the buckles over the case’s bulging sides. She tucked the folders under her arm, took up cane and briefcase, clicked off the overhead light as she went out, and locked the door. On her way out to the parking lot she detoured past the steno pool, where she left the folders of typing for the secretaries to do the next day.

  Then she went home.

  It was dark when her headlights hit the tubular steel gate at the foot of her drive, despite the lengthening daylight hours of early spring. She put the ancient green Land Rover into neutral while she got out and unlocked the gate, then drove through and got out a second time to lock it up. The road just inside the gate was viciously rutted, and she picked her way with care as far as the first bend, where the surface became miraculously smooth and she could shift up into second gear for the long climb to the top.

  A trio of floodlights came on when the car breasted the hill and a light shone from inside the log house, but these signs of life and welcome were purely mechanical, a matter of motion sensors and timer switches rather than human hands. Anne Waverly lived alone; she had done so for the past seventeen years.

  There were the dogs, of course: In them lay life and welcome, and there was Stan now, ecstatic at her return, pushing his nose at the opening of the car door, bumping gently against her as she climbed out. His flat boxer face grinned at her, his hard body wriggled with the effort of wagging the ridiculous stump of his tail, he slobbered and whined and practically pissed himself in pleasure, and Anne allowed herself to be distracted by him. She thumped him and spoke nonsense to him and threw a stick before she picked up her things from the front seat to follow him into the house.

  She went in through the unlocked back door, dumping her briefcase on the kitchen table, and then walked quickly into the small side room, once a pantry, that she had given over as a nursery. Away from the university, she did not seem to need her cane as much.

  The boxer bitch got up to greet her, spilling pups in all directions, and then immediately looked worried at the tiny mewling protests that her movement had raised. Anne ran her hands along Livy’s sleek sides and up her neck, and lowered her head to rest against the dog’s hard forehead. The words “animal comfort” came into her mind, the sheer, primitive comfort of touch, she thought; another living body making contact.

  With that, Livy backed away apologetically to wade back among the pups and settle down to their tiny howls. The sightless grubs went for her as if she’d been away for hours, and Anne laughed quietly at her own abandonment. Oh, well, she thought, there’s always Stan.

  The dog was quite happy to leave his preoccupied mate and join Anne for a brief moonlight hike up the mountain. This was a common ritual, just the sort of regular activity that Anne had been told not to establish, years ago, when the possibility of threat and retribution in her life had seemed real. Some of the precautions she had maintained until they were habit; others were difficult: How was she supposed to get in her road without climbing out of the car twice? How co
uld she teach without showing up in predictable places at the posted times? Besides, all that covert mumbo jumbo was over and done with, she had thought. She had thought.

  A close observer familiar with her habits would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary about her actions during that evening—or, rather, would have seen only minor things: the way Stan had to bark to catch her attention when shoving against her leg and drooling all over her hand failed; the length of time she held one of the blind puppies against her cheek, cupped in both hands, her own eyes tightly shut; the way she twice forgot to use the cane, walking back to get it with only a mild limp; how she cooked a large meal and ended up putting most of it into the refrigerator; and finally the way she got out of her bed after a couple of hours to sit in the small screened-in porch, wrapped in blankets and listening to the night sounds of the early mosquitoes and the bats and the pair of horned owls that lived nearby. She drank, first from a glass and later from a teacup, and let her hand rest on the back of the dog whenever he came and settled for a time beside her chair. She was still in the porch chair at dawn.

  When the sun was up, she got to her feet. Stiff with discomfort and limping heavily at first, she went down the rough-hewn wooden stairs to the main room of the house that served her as study and living room and retreat from the world. She laid several split logs on the coals in the cast-iron stove and opened the dampers full, and then made a restless circuit around the big wood-paneled room filled with comfortable furniture and bookshelves and dark rich colors of orange and red before she eventually fetched up at the heavy desk where she had left her briefcase the night before. She sat down in her chair and took the manila envelope from the bag, only to sit listening to the crackle and hiss from the stove with Glen’s next worrisome community unopened in her hand.

  Three times I’ve gone into the belly of the whale for Glen McCarthy, she thought; three times for him, and once for myself. More than any one person owed her fellow human beings, and a greater slice of her life, her sanity, and certainly her health than she could readily afford to give. She was tired now, she felt thick and damaged and middle-aged, and she wanted nothing but to dedicate herself to simple things like work and friendships and growing things.

  In the beginning, she thought, I worked for Glen because doing so was the only thing that might justify my continued existence, a payback for the lethal blend of arrogance and blindness that killed Abby. Suicide would have been a relief and a coward’s way out, so I gave myself over to Glen and his crazy schemes.

  And on the whole, her work for Glen had been worth it. There was no bringing Abby back, but she had at least saved other mothers’ children. Maybe only a few; perhaps as many as sixty-eight, all the children salvaged from the four communities she had interfered with. No matter the numbers, she had begun to feel a semblance of equilibrium, that she had done her penance and might be allowed to move on.

  How long, Abby? she whispered into the still air. How many more weeks of acting stupid and serene while my bowels go loose with shitting out the terror? How many more times do I ritually pollute myself with that man, whom I don’t know if I love or hate? How long until a great wave of tiredness overtakes me at some crucial moment, and I blurt out something that triggers a madman’s paranoia? Oh God; how many more times can I do this?

  Anne had not realized that she was taking Abby’s photograph from its resting place in the drawer until she found herself sitting back in the chair studying her daughter’s face. She kept the picture hidden for fear that it would become familiar and lose its ability to reach her. Time, however, and the first faint distortions of color on the paper had conspired to make the child a bit of a stranger.

  Abby had not been beautiful; Anne had known that even when she was alive. She was an ordinarily lovely child with a wild mop of curly, almost kinky black hair—Aaron’s impossible hair—dark brown eyes, and a dimple in her right cheek. Her teeth would have required braces had she lived long enough, but at the age the photograph was taken, just after her seventh birthday, their crookedness was merely charming.

  Aaron had taken the picture, unusually enough, although Anne had still been there on the Farm. In the early years of gazing at the photo she had thought that the faint blur on the far right border was her own arm, because she remembered Abby grinning just that way, on the picnic lunch two days before Anne had left, and she wanted very badly to be in the picture with her daughter.

  Print it how they might, though, the photo labs had been able only to raise a blur. It might possibly have been Anne’s elbow; more probably it was the tail of one of the Farm dogs.

  Two days before Anne had driven away in their Volkswagen camper van, the aperture of Aaron’s camera had opened and allowed Abby’s face and her living body to be imprinted onto the emulsion of the film. Two days after the picture was taken, Abby’s mother had abandoned her, driving off to try and “find herself” (a phrase that still had the power to set Anne shaking with an intensity of fury and detestation, on the rare occasions when a student or a friend chanced to use it in her hearing). She drove off to find herself, and eight days later drove home to find instead the remote dirt road clogged with the pulsing lights of a hundred strange vehicles, sheriff and newsmen, ambulance and coroner’s vans, disturbed neighbors and frightened relatives, and at the core of it, when she had finally clawed her frantic way through to the cloying miasma of death that lay over the farmhouse and barn complex, a dozen or more invisible, unmarked, and distinctive late-model cars of American manufacture, driven by men like Glen McCarthy.

  The film in Aaron’s camera had been developed by one of the government agencies as an automatic part of the investigation, and returned to her many months later along with Abby’s shoes and teddy bear and several cartons of Aaron’s books. More than three years later, during the final stages of her Ph.D., she had been moving apartments and come across the few things of theirs that she had kept, and she made the mistake of taking the developed strips of negatives in to be printed. There had been only seven pictures on the roll, three blurry shots of a new foal that Abby had wanted to take, a couple of the hills around the farm, green with the spring rains, one odd and accidental picture of (she thought) Aaron’s boots, and this one of Abby.

  It had been a bad mistake, a nearly disastrous one. The life she had built up for herself, the competent persona she had constructed so painstakingly, had proven more fragile than she could have suspected. That one photograph had acted like the carefully set charges of a demolitions expert taking down a high-rise; when she slid it from the photo-lab wallet, sitting behind the wheel of her car outside the shop, she had felt the shudder immediately, and succeeded only in making it to the safety of her apartment before her mind fell in on itself.

  Once home, she had collapsed into bed and spent a week there, alternately crying and lying in a sleep so deep it felt closer to a coma, before she was dragged out of it by her insistent doorbell with Glen McCarthy’s finger on it. His request for assistance, from someone with not only professional training but personal experience as well in the mechanics of religious aberrations, had literally hauled her back to life. Whether or not this was for the best she had never decided, but it had at least provided a focal point for her life, some sort of purpose to the random motions of eating and thinking. For that, at any rate, she supposed she was grateful.

  Now, though, she was surprised to realize that the momentum of daily life had become a purpose in itself. There was an interest and a savor to her interactions at the university, and she had lately been anticipating the rich smell of warm, freshly turned spring soil as her digging fork sank into the overgrown vegetable patch and the amusement and satisfaction of seeing six boxer puppies learn to run and leap. She had even thought vaguely of taking a trip somewhere, for no reason other than pleasure. How long, Abby?

  Abby looked back at her from the glossy rectangle in her hand, a smiling young face with a faint worry line between her brows as if in foreknowledge of the death that awaited he
r in her mother’s absence, and did not answer. After a while, Anne Waverly closed the photograph of her long-dead only child away in the drawer and reached again for the manila envelope. She carried it into the kitchen, made herself a pot of strong coffee, and sat down at the table to read.

  It was not a terribly thick file, as McCarthy offerings went, and Anne had read it through twice before the coffeepot was empty. She felt somewhat better about this one; indeed, the symptoms were so mild she had to wonder if Glen wasn’t getting a bit fixated. Still, some signs of impending loss of balance within this remote religious community were there, and it was certainly worth taking a closer look from the inside.

  They called themselves Change, and the leader of the Arizona branch, born Steven Chance, was now named Steven Change.

  Twelve years ago Steven and two friends had taken a trip to India and returned, as had countless others, transformed.

  Steven Chance was an American, a young chemist who had been born into a conservative Christian family in the Midwest, put himself through university on a full scholarship, graduated with a degree in chemical engineering, and then gone to work for the English branch of a huge chemical conglomerate. Thomas Mallory was a friend from university with whom Chance had kept in touch, who dropped his job in his father’s contracting business to join Steven on the trip. With them went a brilliant and independently wealthy research physicist with an interest in metallurgy whom Steven had met in England, a man seven years older than Steven, named Jonas Fairweather.

  Something had caused Chance and Fairweather, these two members of levelheaded disciplines, to throw down their lab coats and turn to esoteric doctrines. They quit their jobs—Fairweather not even bothering to resign formally, simply walking away from his desk and his ongoing projects, to the confusion and indignation of his former employers—and sold their cars and furniture, and left.