brightness of the stars. In the distance, coyotes were chattering their eerie call at the moon, and one of the bats that lived among the eaves of the barn darted overhead.
Other than that, there was no sound, no movement.
Ana was wearing the thick Ecuadorian socks she had bought that first day in Sedona, which had the combined virtues of complete silence on the gravel and the innocent evocation of someone who couldn't be bothered to put on her boots just for a brief nocturnal stroll. She also wore the dark blue sweat pants and sweatshirt she habitually slept in, and her hair was uncombed from the pillow. The small flashlight in the pocket of her sweats was a natural thing for anyone to take on a restless night excursion, and she carried nothing else except one crumpled tissue.
She stepped away from the dormitory and onto the path, winced as her heel came down on a sharp rock, then walked quickly across to the hub building. The austere planting of cactuses and shrubs looked alarmingly like men standing by the path. The boojum tree loomed large and pale, although she was expecting it, and it took some effort not to turn and check on the still figures as she went past them.
Inside the building, she scurried across the dimly lit foyer, feeling as exposed as a rabbit in headlights, and went through both sets of swinging doors into the meditation hall. There she paused, catching her breath. The room was pitch black, with only the faintest light coming from right up at the top, where the moonlight on the translucent dome showed as a vague glow. She stood listening for a couple of minutes, and nearly leapt out of her skin when a small rustle and crackle came out of the dark not twenty feet away. Dry-mouthed and with pounding heart, she strained to hear, and when it came again she nearly laughed aloud in relief: It was the last coals in the suspended fireplace, collapsing in on themselves. She snapped on the flashlight, playing it around and above to confirm that she was alone, and then went forward to investigate.
The night she had come here looking for Jason she had approached the great central stem of the structure that supported the fireplace and Steven's platform. She had pounded on it with her fist in anger, hoping for a loud echo to jolt Steven from his trance, but the dull thud it gave indicated a heavy degree of insulation inside the pipe. What she had only dimly noted at the time, but which had returned to niggle at her, was that despite the insulation, the pipe had felt warm.
The fireplace above it could conceivably have sent its heat down along the base. It was, in fact, the most logical explanation. However, Ana had seen the original plans for this structure, submitted to the county planning department, and she was quite certain that there had been a partial basement included in the drawings. Heat could travel down from an overhead fire, yes, but heat more naturally traveled upward. Was there just a central heating boiler down beneath the meditation hall? Or was there something else?
An alchemical laboratory, perhaps?
Ana left the meditation hall and went back through the main foyer and into the school offices. She had been around the school long enough to know the handful of places where a door to the basement might be hidden. It was not in any of them: not in the back of the storage closet in Teresa's office, not in the men's rest room, not in the cluttered depths of the janitorial closet. She rather doubted that the entrance would involve ripping up the carpeting or rotating an entire wall with a secret switch, but she found herself pushing at the spines of the books on Teresa's shelves, just in case the switch was hidden there. She made herself stop that pointless exercise: It was nearly three o'clock, and Change with its combination of rural demands and long-distance workers began to stir by five. She had no time to waste, and it did not seem that the entrance was here.
That left either the meditation hall or upstairs, and she had no wish to venture up among the sleeping authorities. She went back out to the school entranceway and from there into the great circular hall, and stood playing the beam of her light over the walls, thinking hard. After a minute, she started to climb the platforms up the side of the hall. At first she looked closely at the walls, but then she stopped that and just climbed straight for the top, to the single seat that was higher than Steven's, the platform she had never seen occupied. And there it was, a narrow rectangle built into the wall and concealed by the dim lighting, the wall hangings, and the reluctance of the Change members to venture beyond their proper places.
It was locked, but before climbing down to retrieve the key ring Teresa kept in her desk, Ana looked around for the equivalent of the key-under-the-doormat, and she found one, under Steven's thick meditation pillow on the next step down. She used it to unlock the door, then put the key back where she had found it and pushed the door open.
If it was dark in the meditation hall, the doorway was a black pit. She gingerly stepped inside, pulled the door shut, and switched on her flashlight. The steps were slightly tapered, narrower at the inner side to fit into the circular wall, but otherwise even and perfectly sound. They continued on, featureless, past the place where she estimated the floor of the hall lay, a gentle spiral leading into the depths. There were lights, but she stuck to the flashlight—no telling what else the light switch would turn on.
The stairway ended at another narrow wooden door, this one unlocked. She nudged it open, and stepped into a medieval laboratory into which a computer had been dropped.
The room seemed to be the same shape and size as the meditation hall overhead, but it seemed smaller because the ceiling was so low: If Steven were to give an uncharacteristic leap of enthusiasm down here, he would brain himself on the rough beams. The room was strewn with worktables and cluttered with equipment that ranged from shiny new glass beakers to crude redbrick furnaces with huge bellows leaning against their sides, but at the moment what took Ana's attention was the object at the precise center of the circle and hence directly below the black pipe that rose out of the hall floor.
It was a shiny, pear-shaped, potbellied…
She pulled the Kleenex out of her pocket and, using it to keep her fingerprints from the shiny surface, wiggled the latch until it gave. The door drifted inward. She leaned inside and saw the same ovals repeated there. A large circular pad took up the middle of the object's nearly flat bottom, but as far as Ana could see, there was no source of light.
She bent over to thread herself through the door, and straightened up inside. 'Ommm,' she tried softly, and the noise hummed and echoed around her. She smiled. This was, she guessed, a variation on the sensory deprivation tanks so popular with the human potential movement, although she had never before seen one that didn't use warm salty water to induce the hypnotic feedback of the mind denied external stimuli. She had spent any number of hours in such tanks, finding them slightly claustrophobic but immensely restful.
She climbed back out, refastened the latch, and made a circle of the room.
Evenly spaced around the silver tank were the six small redbrick kilns or fireplaces. Their flues joined together in a six-pointed star just at the pear-shaped thing's top—the source, no doubt, of the heat she had felt coming from the pipe the night Jason was missing. Next out from the furnaces were three long, battered workbenches, each with two workstations and situated so a person could move easily between bench and furnace. The benches were strewn with the ancient tools of a metallurgist or chemist: alembics, yes, as well as retorts and scales with weights ranging from the minute to the massive, mortars and pestles of various sizes and composition, scoops and pipettes, funnels and mallets, long-handled pincers and galvanized buckets, heavy gloves with high gauntlet tops, and an assortment of jewellers' loupes, hammers, and tweezers. Actually, she realized, she had seen something very like it before, somewhere in Europe—Heidelberg, was it? Or Koln?—where an alchemical laboratory had been recreated for the benefit of the tourists.
One section of wall had a bookshelf, sagging under the weight of numerous thick volumes. Some of them were merely bound photocopies of books attributed to 'Hermes Trismegistus', 'Miriam the Jewess', and other well-known alchemical authorities. Other volumes were ancient leather-bound tomes that looked original. Ana winced to think what someone had paid for them, only to have them stored in a dusty environment where the only climate control was in six coal-burning fireplaces.
And then there was the computer. Ana's hands itched for it, but it was not a kind she knew well and she doubted that on a strange machine she would be able to hide her footsteps, were anyone to wonder if unauthorized persons had been perusing its electronic innards. Reluctantly, for the time being, she left it alone.
Beyond the bookshelves were supply cabinets with jars and canisters, all labelled. Ana had not done any chemistry since high school, but she could identify that the vials of mercury and the jars of sulphur were what they
