She worked one-handed alongside the other two women, carrying in plates and wiping surfaces until they had finished the heaps of pans, and then she fixed herself a cup of tea (one of the perks of working in the kitchen) and went to use the toilet before the evening meditation.
Steven began his talk by mentioning the situation in England. He sounded untroubled, though, and his attitude proved contagious. The chant was a poetic image if an awkward phrase: "Boiling water, peaceful clouds." When meditation was over, Ana slipped away and went to her room, and there to bed.
Setting the tiny alarm on her wristwatch for one A.M.
Chapter Twenty
Modern Religious Expressions 85
We Were All Once Cultists
Anne M. Waverly
Duncan Point University
All religions were once new, and all established religious were once a brash hodgepodge of ideas and images snatched and cobbled together in an attempt to put revelation into words. The prophet Mohammed built his house on the foundations of The Book, using bricks made of his own native soil; Jesus the Messiah was a believing Jew with a new vision of man's relationship with God; Judaism itself bears clear imprint of the people who worshipped in the land before they came, the psalms and images of Canaanite gods, even to the very shape of its Temple.
Archaeologists glory in (and despair over) the immutability of stone and the thrifty habits of one generation of builders to make use of the decrepit structures of previous generations in building anew: Gravestones are turned into paving stones, inscribed triumphs reversed to become part of a blank wall, and Roman markers tumble out of a medieval wall under demolition. Theological historians take equal joy in the discoveries of one tradition taken up and used by another: a theophanic hymn to Yahweh that preserves the cadence of a song dedicated to the storm-god Baal; a set of characteristics-beard, tent, age, wisdom—that speak of the authority of the God of the Israelites which are also seen in the physical description of the Canaanite El; the Gilgamesh story and certain mythic elements in the Old Testament stories
From "We Were All Once Cultists," by Anne M. Waverly, in Modern Religious Expressions, ed. Antony Makepeace, University of California Press, 1989
The outside lights were shut down at midnight, except those along the road between the gate and the parking lot and one hanging from the front of the barn, the purpose of which Ana had not been able to figure out. The halls of the buildings remained lighted, but anyone who needed to negotiate the paths after that time was expected to use one of the wild assortment of flashlights that were kept near the outer doors.
Ana took her own, pencil-sized flashlight with her as she let herself out of the sleeping building.
She ducked into the shadows away from the door to allow her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The night was clear and cold—not as cold as when she had first come to Change a month ago but still with the crisp, dry temperature drop of the desert. A waning moon lay near the surrounding hills, casting enough light to give shape to the buildings now that her eyes were adapting, and enabling the side of her vision to pick out the white stones that edged the walkways. The sky was black from one horizon to the other with no city lights to dilute the hard 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.