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.