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… thing nearly the height of the room and perhaps six feet across its thickest part, made of some shiny metal like stainless steel or polished aluminum. Its smooth sides were punctuated by six large oval designs that did not quite meet, looking vaguely like seams. She examined the thing closely and decided that whereas five of the circles were indeed laid-on welding, the sixth one was meant to give way: there was a small, sturdy latch on the right-hand side.
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 Köln?—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 said, and the blue packages of ordinary table salt, looking peculiarly homely and out of place, still bore their factory seals. She didn't know what antimony, saltpeter, or half a dozen other labelled substances ought to look like, but she could think of no real reason to doubt that they were what they said. A large bowl contained an incongruous heap of dried half-eggshells; a topless shoe-box sagged out under the burden of twenty or so large lead fishing weights; and six small stoppered test-tubes held granules of what appeared to be silver.
She searched the back of each shelf with her light, careful to move nothing. Everything was dusty, the disused substances at the back more so, until she got to her knees to check the contents of the very bottom shelf, and noticed a small box, nearly hidden behind some stoneware mortars, that seemed remarkably dust free. Taking note of its precise location, she reached in and eased it out. It was a grocer's package of ordinary blocks of paraffin wax.
She ran a thumb thoughtfully over the cool, slightly greasy surface of the wax block, struck by the combination of pushed-to-the-back abandonment and its cleanliness. After a minute, she began to smile.
A useful substance, wax. Children made strange, amoeba-shaped candles on the beach with it and handymen rubbed it onto sticking drawers. Ana's mother used to pour a thick layer of melted wax onto the top of her jams and jellies, and Ana could recall the childhood magic of pushing down on the round wax plug and having the other side rise up to reveal the sweet preserves underneath. Wax was useful, too, in molding itself around a shape, in providing weight and bulk to a hollow core—or, conversely, in obscuring whatever it surrounded.
She bent down and carefully put the box back into its original place. One of the commoner tricks of the alchemical charlatan, according to one of Glen's books, was to soften a lump of dirty gray wax and wrap it around a piece of gold. When the resulting "lead" was heated in its glass alembic, the wax burned away as black smoke, miraculously revealing a puddle of pure gold.
The word "sincere" literally translates "without wax", Ana mused, brushing the dust from the knees of her sweats. Unadulterated. Pure. The presence of cere in this laboratory was very interesting.
Although she would have sworn that Steven truly believed that he himself had actually created gold.
She glanced at her watch: nearly 4 A.M., and time to leave. She walked a last time around the man-sized alembic in the center of the room, and suddenly knew where she'd seen the shape before: as an aura, surrounding a meditating figure at the end of the TRANSFORMATION mural in the dining hall.