A Freshly Killed Body

Chapter one  

  It has always taken me a long time to warm up to strangers but here I was sitting shoeless on the floor with a dozen of them.  I usually turn my back and run when anyone mentions self-improvement workshops.  That's all hype.  I'm thirty-three years old and I don't look to improve much anymore.  I don't see a lot of improvement going on in too many other people around me either.  In fact, things seem to be going in the opposite direction.
I was two hundred fifty miles away from home.  Sitting in an octagon shaped room of windows on a hundred acre retreat center near Hudson, New York.  Listening to a hawk faced woman named Peg Woodward expound on a system of personality types called the Enneagram.  I had to admit that the setting approximated heaven.  A strong scent of honeysuckle blew through the windows.
I knew my attitude was wrong because I caught myself smirking inwardly when the other group members started spilling out their stories.  I have always felt  tugged apart by two conflicting forces.  Sometimes I want to be included, to be part of the show.  But more often I want to be the outsider looking in, analytical and critical.  The latter tendency took the upper hand when the woman named Cindy spoke.
  She was a short, heavy set woman with cropped silver hair.  Her dress was so flowery that she looked like something that needed planting.  "Hi, my name's Cindy and I came here because I want to learn more about the nine enneagram personality types. I'm always looking to grow.  Last year I had to make a painful decision...to leave my husband after twenty-one years of marriage.  Because unlike me, he wasn't growing.   I even think he was shrinking a little bit."
 Then tears. All that talk of growing just reinforced my garden metaphor.  She should have mixed a few plant tabs in her husband's food.
Peg Woodward was beaming.  "That's wonderful, Cindy, that you were able to share so much. Mmmm."
She sounded like she was being fed ice cream, I thought. 
 I watched Peg's beam fall on a thin young woman sitting next to me.   Flaming red toenails accentuated the whiteness of her bare feet.  I took her to be a victim.  I guess that was my eleven years as a child abuse investigator coming out.  I'd guessed her age as twenty. If I had heard her squeaky voice first, I would have revised my estimate several years downward.
"My name's Dawn...."
Peg, her head craned forward, gave a series of encouraging nods.  She looked like a big bird, ready to snap up the slightest crumb.  But Dawn had stage fright. Or maybe she had no story.  Contrary to popular opinion, not everybody  does.
  Dawn squirmed.  Her silence piqued more interest than Cindy's confessions. "I'm sorry."  Her faltering voice trailed off.  "I can't think of anything to say."
"Mmmm. Well, maybe later.  Next to you?"
Of course I had been rehearsing what I was going to "share." My self-preoccupation was such that I had tuned out all but the most skeletal facts about the others.  Somewhere it had registered on my consciousness that there were a disproportionate number of nurses, social workers and assorted mental health counselors in the circle.  A couple of people even had the audacity to identify  themselves as spiritual healers.  I wished them luck.
  It would sound unliberated to explain that I had gone to Pilgrim Farm in order to tag along on a vacation with my boyfriend.  Besides. I have no boyfriend.  My mother, forever hopeful, used to call Greg Heatherington my boyfriend.  But Greg had grabbed his parachute when all my trouble on the job began.  Ian is a good friend who happens to be a man.  He is in no way a boyfriend.  Since he's well into his thirties,  most people would flinch at calling him a boy.  I have known Ian Henry since childhood.  He's one of those cousins who isn't really a cousin, but a cousin's cousin.  My mother never wanted a lot of hassle from relatives, but the family is small enough so that even the more peripheral members can't entirely be ignored. On the surface, Ian and I did not hold much in common.  He eats, drinks and sleeps computers. At the least, he is usually at his computer when he performs these three functions. Anything out of a cathode ray tube bores me, television as well as computers. Musically, Ian is an opera buff.  I like golden oldies. Yet, Ian and I  have a common bond.  Our family considers us the eccentric ones, chiefly because we are both single and satisfied to remain so.
"Take a workshop," Ian had taunted.  "Take a chance."
"A chance on what?  You selling raffle tickets?"
"A chance on self expansion, Tommy. I've signed up for the Ceremonial and Ritual group."
My name is Jill Thomas but when Ian gets fed up he always calls me Tommy.
"I don't stand on ceremony, Ian.  I didn't even go to my college graduation."
"I think they're offering Enneagram.  A system of personality types. That should dovetail neatly into your social work."
"Except that I just quit my job as a social worker, remember? And I doubt that I'll ever be hired as one again."
 He had changed the pitch of his persuasion.  "It's a beautiful setting. Used to be an old monastery.  Now it's some kind of retreat center.  It's run by the Pilgrims."
"Retreat from reality, it sounds like.  What do you mean, Pilgrims?"
"They were very active in this country and England the early part of the century.  I think they got over to Germany  too.  As an older group, they've been able to build up some wealthy benefactors through the years.  They own quite a few pieces of property."
  "What are they, some kind of a crackpot religion?"  I asked.
 "They're not exactly a religion.  They do promulgate ideas of peace and brotherly love.  Don't pull that face, Jill, they're a very benign group."
"Benign?  You make them sound like a tumor diagnosis."
"Everyone knows the Pilgrims are respectable."
"Everyone knows?  That's a logical fallacy.  The argument from authority."
He had gotten miffed and retorted that he was not arguing at all, he had just  thought that I might profit from a week in a beautiful setting.  Wasn't the end of July sure to be scorching and humid in Baltimore?
  In the end, I gave in.   I can't count how many times since then that I've had occasion to remember his words about enjoying a week in a beautiful setting.  Ian did not lie about the beautiful setting.
 What I didn't know was that after that week, my life would never again be the same.
  Peg Woodward was eager, expectant.  I think it was her beatific smile that made me go ballistic.  As soon as I opened my mouth, I felt the dissociation.  It was like I was listening to myself listen to myself.  God knows I wasn't lipping anything I had rehearsed. 
 "I'm Jill Thomas. I don't have anything to dump out about myself. The nine Enneagram personality types seem to be just another example of system building.  I would guess that there as many personalities as there are people living in the world.  It seems silly  to classify them."
The room grew as silent as sudden death.  I could tell I had caused a lot of stomach churning.  The group waited for Peg Woodward to assert her control.  The leader stared at me like I'd pinched her.
 When Peg finally spoke, her voice caused the room temperature to drop by twenty degrees.  "I had really hoped," she said, "that everyone in this group would 
have had at least a rudimentary knowledge of the Enneagram.  The fact that you stated that there are nine types tells me that your knowledge is meager.  Each of those nine can manifest at nine different levels, from the most healthy to the totally dysfunctional.  In addition, each of the nine core types has a wing,  and there are all degrees of wing.  Is there anyone else in the room who is totally without knowledge of the Enneagram?"
I glanced around without moving my head. If I'd had a wing, I would have flown out of there.   I noticed that no hands were raised.  Unsmiling for once, Peg said  "Let's move on to the next person."
The "next person" sounded like a decent type.  He called himself Joe something or other, it was a long Italian name.  He said that he worked as a nurse in an E. R.  and that he was probably a  "type four," getting too bogged down by his own inner states.  He wanted to get out of himself more and improve his empathy with others.
  I thought that I could take a hint and adopt the same goal.
Now people were bustling around for  notebooks, balancing themselves on their bare or stockened feet that had  fallen asleep after a couple hours of sitting.  Our pile of sandals, thongs and cross trainers had been deposited at the door.  I wondered what would happen if I tried to switch my down at the heels running shoes for a better pair.   But stealing isn't one of my vices.
"Your assignment," Peg was saying,  "is to go outside and take a nature walk.  Let yourselves drift along in a contemplative state. Pay particular attention to your senses.   Blend in with the environment.  Go touch a tree and feel that tree as a part of yourself.  Bend down and touch the earth.  When you find a spot that feels right to you, sit down and start journaling.  Write whatever comes into your mind.  Use the right side of your brain."
 The last thing I intended to do was to raise my hand and announce that I was left-handed.  I know that many left-handed people, along with their right-handed friends, still have language and logic in the left halves of their brain. I hadn't a notion which of my hemispheres was dominant.  Days like this, I was lucky to know I had a brain at all.
 "You are to try to consider certain questions. Can you think of five words you would use to describe your personality?  What do you do to generate psychic energy?  How do you try to control your environment?  Mmmm.  You'll probably want to jot that down.  You can start out now.  You'll want to come back here in about an hour."
I had my doubts about the last.
  The young woman named Dawn, who hadn't been able to think of anything to tell,  gave my arm a light touch.  "I liked your comments.  I think you were just saying that we shouldn't label people."
"And oh yes,"  Peg Woodward called out,  "remember that there are a couple of other workshops meeting on the grounds.  One of them is a silent meditation group.  If you pass anyone from that group,  you might just nod.  Don't try to get them to talk."
That group sounded worth the workshop fee! 
We drifted toward the door.  Most reclaimed their shoes but a few people opted for the feel of bare skin touching mother earth.  I started down the wooded path that I thought led toward the monastery.  I had an idea to take a quick gander and see if I could spy Ian.
"Excuse me.  I need to speak with you a minute."  The voice was terse.  I was taller than average, about five-eight, but facing Peg Woodward I saw that she stood nearly a head taller than myself.  
"I'm unclear about your reason for signing up for the workshop." No one could ever accuse me of failing to recognize hostility.
  I maintained the tone. "I didn't know that I needed a reason.  I thought I only needed my credit card."
"It's very important for the workshop to be a caring, loving and safe environment.  People need to be able to trust that. If someone withholds, there's an energy block and things can't flow around it."
  I wasn't sure I would be able to abide a week of this woman.  I was, however, aware of my predicament.  I was a long way from a bus.  Ian had driven. I'd paid my fee. I  needed a vacation.
"I got it."  My voice was civil.  "I'll give it another shot.  Excuse me.  I'd better get on with my assignment."
I would have rather explored the terrain than my personality type.  The stone monastery, the original building, stood in a clearing, surrounded by tall shade trees.  Along the side leading through the woods toward the octagon room, someone had planted an old fashioned flower garden, with rose bushes, huge orange marigolds, blue and purple ageratums, and rainbows of zinnias.  A stream trickled under  a narrow wooden footbridge.  I stepped onto the bridge like a cat but the wood still creaked. Peering into the water, I could count the water lilies. 
  Just beyond the bridge, I spied what looked like a gazebo with walls.  The little wooden hut seemed crudely built and roughly circular.  Its diameter was about the length of a tall man.  The door had one small  window at eye level, like the entrance to a sauna.
I was only a few feet from this door when it suddenly flung open. A raven haired, cinnamon complexioned man emerged. He wore a pale flowing shirt, matching slacks, sandals. I felt like I had encountered the young Krishnamurti.  The man glided toward the footbridge.  I could have sworn that his feet didn't touch the ground.   I thought I'd better not speak.  He might be one of the silent meditators.
The man gave me what almost amounted to a formal bow.  "Our meditation room," he said in a modulated voice.  "It is available at any time, unless of course it is already in use."
"Of course," I said.  "Meditation-for-One.  You wouldn't want people to come piling in."  I have a bad habit of saying almost anything when I'm not sure what I want to say.  "Are you in one of the workshops?"
"No workshop.   I am working here this summer.  I help in the kitchen and the garden.  But I must still take time for my devotional practices.   Please take a look."
He held the door open. I saw that the exterior belied what lay within.  The interior was pyramid shaped.  The room smelled of cedar wood and jasmine incense. A pair of gold silken cushions rested against a wall.  A small oriental patterned rug covered the floor.  The miniature cubical shaped altar held a silver chalice and a polished brass  disc. I noted a lighted candle and what I thought was a crystal. I didn't actually step inside because that would probably have entailed taking off my shoes again.  
"What kind of altar is that? New Age generic?"
"There are many forms of God and many ways to worship," he said enigmatically.  "My name is Rao.  Do you find Pilgrim Farm a place of great beauty? You must see the view from on top the overhang.  Have you been up there yet?"
I shook my head. Rao had an unusual speech cadence, nearly equal weight given to every syllable.  
"This little stream flows into much larger one a hundred yards or so from the octagon room.  That is where your workshop is meeting,  I think?"
I wondered how he knew.  
"You can stand on top of the bluff which overlooks the river valley.  There is a spectacular view of the countryside.  That is a view you do not want to miss."
"I'd better head over that way now.  I'm supposed to be communing with trees and figuring out whether or not I'm a feeling type, a thinking type or instinctive type."
"Quite so."  I watched Rao glide through the flower garden like he was on a monorail.
I poked around in the clearing near the monastery, all the while reminding myself that I hadn't the faintest idea where Ian's workshop was meeting.  I guess I felt freaked enough by my clash with Peg Woodward to need to tell the only other person I knew on the farm. After ten minutes or so, I gave it up and retraced my steps through the woods.  I glanced around for a tree to hug but couldn't find one that I fancied.
 Coming up from the opposite direction, I heard someone singing an aria from "Rigoletto."  I spied the familiar roly poly shape of Ian. In his pressed jeans and designer tee shirt, he looked more like the computer programmer dressed down for Friday Casual Day than he did a participant of a ritual magic workshop.
  "I thought you'd be in your Merlin the Magician robe by now,"  I called.
"Hey!  What are you doing out?  Did you draw probation before verdict?"
This light hearted banter is our usual method of greeting although the "probation" crack wasn't as funny now as it would have been a few months ago.
 "I actually need someone who can perform a couple of magic tricks!  Look at this assignment that I've been given!   Ah my, I'm in teacher's doghouse already!"  Laughing, I conveyed the substance of my outburst to Peg Woodward. "How's your workshop?"
"It has promise.  The teacher seems to be a very enlightened old gentleman.  He calls himself Anubis."
"Anubis!  Get real!"   I thought of the woman named Cindy who'd left her husband. The mysterious Indian in the meditation room. Me looking around to cozy up to a tree.  And now this Anubis-- and Ian's deadly serious brow.  The unreality of the whole thing started me laughing uncontrollably.
"Anubis, Egyptian jackal faced god." Ian ignored my giggle fit. "Anubis was said to be the guardian against the forces of the lower astral.  He supposedly guards the spirit while the body is out.  He's a go-between this world and the next."
"A sort of liaison worker?  He must be kept busy.  This teacher Anubis, does he have another name?"
"Abel Meyer,"  Ian said. "But you have to be in his inner circle to call him that."
That was when his body suddenly stiffened.  His face froze, his mouth half opened.
"What is it?"  I asked.  But  he held up his hand to  signal silence.
  "I thought I heard someone cry out!"
My mood made the quick shift from silly to vigilant.  I could hear the sound of rapids from the river valley that Rao had talked about.
 And then from somewhere above, the cries.  "No! No! Please! No!"  
We listened for an eternal second.
"It sounds like someone's being attacked,"  I whispered.
Then a loud, receding scream.  By that time, we were both running in the direction of the voice. The wooded area receded behind us as we reached a small bridge. One hundred feet under the bridge, turbulent waters splashed against eroded rocks.   Looking across from the opposite side of the overhang, we could see the form of a woman lying on her face in the water. and rocks.  

Chapter two

"Send help!  We need help!"  I found myself charging up the path, not knowing whom I could summons nor what help would be required. It was then that I collided head on with a broad shouldered man who came bounding from the opposite direction.
"Sorry, are you all right?"  
Lying sprawled on my back, I don't know how I focused my attention to notice my assailant at all.  I couldn't help but be struck by his wavy blond hair, good teeth, even features and evenhanded demeanor. I jumped up without taking inventory of my bruises. This was no time for wound licking.
  To Ian, this blond adonis barked a series of orders.   "Run up to the monastery.  Tell them that Alexander said to send some men. Call the emergency number. We'll need an ambulance.  I'm going to try to slide down and reach her."
The speaker gave the commands like a man who takes being in authority for granted.  I wasn't thinking too clearly but I registered that the man had very light blue eyes. I turned around and watched him lower himself down at a place where the bank was least steep. There was no need to round up anybody because suddenly as many as a dozen of the campers had appeared.  Perhaps they had been aroused by the same screams. At any rate, the narrow wooded path was looking more and more like a crowded city street corner. Several people, shimmying on their fannies, followed the leader down the bank. Within seconds the retreat center had made a turnabout from tree-worshiping tranquillity to full red alert.  I felt stunned and disoriented by the transition.  
Rao came trotting up from the garden.  He had left his alpha brain waves behind.  He resembled a frightened deer caught in the middle of the headlights. "Run to the nearest phone and tell them to send an ambulance," I heard Ian say..  "Someone's been badly hurt."
Ian slipped an arm around me.  "Are you all right?  That was quite a takedown."
"I'm fine."  I was sickened. "Who was that fellow?"  Not that I cared.  I was talking out of my head.
"He's in my workshop.  He seems to have a role in running the thing.  Name's Alexander Love.  Should I try to get down there?"
The man called Alexander waded in the water.  If he could walk on it, he didn't.  He was the first to reach the stilled figure. I could see his  tall body bending over the girl.
He had dragged her to the river bank.  With the body half in and half out of the water, he was giving CPR.  "It doesn't look good," he called to the others.  "Are there any healers here?  I need them--ah, she needs them!  Stat!"
Even in my numbed condition, I took note of the "stat," the lingo of the medical doctor.  I had logged in hundreds of hours sitting in emergency rooms with battered children but had never heard a stat command go over the intercom for healers.
As it happened, the woods was rife with them. Campers were scampering along the path, blossoming out from branches of trees. Twelve or more had now encircled the fallen shape, extending their hands palms down within inches of the body without actually touching it.  
"They're working on the subtle body,"  Ian explained.  "The theory is that the subtle or etheric body extends out a few inches from the physical body."
Did he believe that?  "Has anyone thought of bandages, splints?"
I could strain to hear a distant ambulance, which always starts with that ominous faint warble and ends up with an insatiable hyena-like howling.  Almost the whole population of the retreat center had assembled by now.  "How do you suppose she fell?"  I asked a man with a gray Santa Claus beard.
He folded his hands as though praying but gave no answer.  I had forgotten.  The silent retreat!  But wasn't this carrying things a bit far?
  A fortyish man, dark hair combed straight back and intense brown eyes, chose to answer the question. His voice was strangely terse.  He had a way of making each sentence sound like he had finished talking.  "She fell from the other side of the river bank Drop's the steepest there. Probably climbed up for the view.  Wandered too close to the edge. A cliff overhang is not terra firma.   Too much vibration and the earth will crust off."
  I digested this geology lesson and accepted a professorial look. The speaker wore a gummed paper label which read "hello my name is Victor."  He winced as he watched my eyes fall on it.  He ripped off the name tag with an abrupt yank.  
  I grew up on the asphalt streets of Baltimore, in the neighborhood of Charles Village, spawned by Calvert Street, St. Paul Street and all the major thoroughfares for downtown commuters breaking their necks to get back and forth from the suburbs.  I had less education about the behavior of bluffs and overhangs.  "I heard her cry out,"   I said.  "She didn't fall right away.  It was like she was grabbing on to something, trying to save herself."
The rescue sirens were nearer now.  There were two distinct, horrible warblings, two tortured voices, each trying to outshout the other.  Below, in the river, the healers stood knee deep in the water.  Their bodies blocked any view I might have had of the victim.
I spied my Enneagram teacher, Peg Woodward.  She was not one of those who had ventured into the stream.
 "We're trying to get the group to return to the workshop now.  It's the best way.  We can have a group healing."
I had no desire to return to the workshop, but it seemed unkind to stand here and gawk.  An ambulance and two fire engines were zigzagging across the Pilgrim property.  These vehicles of rescue--and sometimes of death--had deserted the driveway and were bumping their way across the stretch of field. The landscape underwent still another transformation: red and white lights were flashing in our eyes.  In a susceptible person these could have triggered a seizure.  In my own case, they were inducing a sick headache. The blinking lights, the shouts,  the blaring of radio equipment all sounded the death knell to the serenity of Pilgrim Farm.  I doubted that it would ever be serene again.
 I listened to pressured conversations about constructing pulleys,lowering ropes. 
The grim looking man named Victor turned to Ian.  "Anubis has sent word that he is waiting to reconvene the group." He spoke with a quaint formality. "Alexander should remain here because of his medical expertise."
 Anubis was waiting?  I wondered if he had ever stood at a bus stop in Baltimore. 
"Are you sure you're all right?"  asked solicitous Ian.  "If so, I'll go back to my class."
"You go," I said and turned to walk in the direction of the octagon room.
The rescuers were now debating the safest method of hoisting a stretcher a hundred feet  into the air.
"Ineptitude," Victor muttered."Why can't they hurry!"  I could understand why he was wearing his  grim face now, but I suspected that he always looked like that.
We turned to face a woman with styled silver-gray hair and narrowed blue eyes. Her dripping skirt signaled that she had been one of the healers in the water.  She looked at least sixty but her age gave no hint of weakness either physical or mental.  "There's sadly no reason  for them to hurry, Victor,"  she pronounced.  "Dawn is dead."

Chapter three

People stood in pairs or small groups, hugging each other, crying, or simply staring into space.  They seemed frozen into position, as in a bizarre tableaux.
  Because I had nowhere to retreat to except my cell-like room, I eventually wandered back into Peg Woodward's workshop.  I didn't bother to remove my shoes this time. I just retrieved my cushion and plopped down in my place on the floor.  The circle had a gap in the space to my left where Dawn had sat. No one had wanted to slide over to fill in that spot.  My classmates had their eyes closed.  Some had their fingers folded as in prayer.  Others had their hands raised above their heads like basketball players attempting a free shot.  
"Send the healing violet light out to our sister Dawn.  May this light serve to propel her as her soul makes its transition....and when you are ready, bring your consciousness back into this room."  Peg Woodward ended the guided meditation with a couple of exaggerated deep swishing breaths.
"I know that it is hard to sit here with so much that's happened and all of the commotion outside.  We can expect some disruption for the rest of the afternoon.  Men are working on removing Dawn's body from the river bed. Sadly, she must have wandered too close to the edge of the cliff and gone over.  Perhaps she was concentrating on her assignment and did not notice where...." Peg let the thought die cold.
Had she felt her own culpability, I wondered.  A fancy lawyer building up a suit case could argue that the group leader had sent us out of our safe classroom to stumble around the hazardous terrain.  There was even the suggestion that we walk in a contemplative state. An altered state!  Why hadn't the instructor specifically warned us not to walk off a cliff?  Or so the questioning might go.
 "Since Dawn's accident resulted in a fatal injury, you can expect to encounter some people from the police at Pilgrim Farm," Peg continued.  "They may ask to speak with some of you.  Should this happen, you will of course want to cooperate with them.  And now we really must get back to our Enneagram studies.  There is no more that we can do to help...what has happened outside.  Dawn, like the rest of us, came here to increase her self knowledge through this type of study, and I am certain that she would want us to go ahead with our purpose.
"To review, then:  Personality types five, six and seven are known as the thinking types.  Fives are so comfortable with thinking that sometimes they become unhealthy and isolate themselves from the actual world.  The six might be a very loyal friend  and employee.  At a less healthy level, though, he could become too beholden to authority.  Healthy sevens are very enthusiastic, very accomplished individuals. But sometimes they get bored and restless and want to experience too many things at once...."
 My brain was starting to close up on the Enneagram like a lid being slammed down on a coffin. My disdain toward Peg Woodward poured out of me like scalding water from a faucet.  I knew it was irrational but I couldn't shut it off.
 Another writing assignment was given.  I pulled together my pocketbook and notebook and, avoiding eye contact, silently stood up to leave. I had my hand on the door when Peg's voice intercepted me.  
"Jill, are you leaving?"
What the hell does it look like! 
We had both stepped outside the door. Apparently Peg shared my sense that the conversation was not for the ears of the class.
 "I'm sorry.  I can't concentrate on these studies, given the fact that there's a body lying out there in the riverbed."
Peg slipped into the role of a confidant.  "Does death bother you so much?"
Of course not, let's have one every day!
"Counseling is being set up for everyone at Pilgrim Farm who wishes to make use of it.  I myself will be one of the counselors.  I strongly urge you...."
"I don't need counseling, Ms. Woodward.  I worked as a child abuse investigator for eleven years.  I can handle an occasional body. There's just something about you that I'm struggling with.  I don't feel that I can work with you.  It's probably some incompatibility of personality type.   I think I should transfer to another workshop."
The flash of relief on her face made me dare to press for a favor. "I didn't travel all the way from Baltimore to do silent meditation.  I could have stayed home and done that right in my apartment. Except for all the police cars screaming by, and now we've got them here too. Perhaps you'll be good enough to speak with Anubis and see if he can find a place for me in his group."  I couldn't remember what Ian had said Anubis' rightful name was.
I felt that I was being newly appraised.  I also knew that Peg didn't want to help me.  "Anubis?  Do you have  experience with ritual magic?"
I admitted that I did not.
After a silent standoff, she said,  "I'll try to speak with him if I see him."
I knew an "okay-doke" when I heard it.  I was sure that she wouldn't utter a word.
Before Peg could turn back to her classroom, a woman with a waddling but brisk walk was breathing down our necks.  A surly, stocky woman who looked to be pushing fifty.  Short straight gray hair.  A fawn and umber skirt.  A blouse and blazer that, with a better fit, might have been called a power suit. Wire glasses and wandering hazel eyes.  Black laced athletic shoes.  
"This the place she came from?"
Peg wrung her hands.  "Uh--can you tell me what you mean?"
"You bet I can, lady. I need to get you both to step back into the building.  Who's in charge here?"
"Well, well, I'm the teacher,"  Peg faltered.  "I can't say that anyone is in charge."
"Thank you!  You're the teacher, then you're in charge."  The comments were directed to the assembled group.  "Inez Sharp.  Homicide."
There were a chorus of gasps, oh-mi-gods.
"Surely you don't think...." someone uttered.
Inez Sharp whirled on the offender.  The hapless speaker had been Cindy, the incredible growing woman.  "I don't need any help, thank you, in telling me what I should think!  Now, you-all,  no one's going to leave this room until I can get to the bottom of what's going on here.  Teacher, what can you tell me about how your pupil ended up with her skull bashed open  at the bottom of a river bed?"
I wrote off the bout as a nolo contendre and wondered if Peg Woodward had ever in her life dealt with anyone like this blunt, bullying homicide detective.
"They were sent out to do a journaling exercise."  Peg clutched her hands to her chest as though she were warding off a bullet.
"Beg your pardon, M'am?"
  "That means to write...."
" Why was it necessary to go out to the cliff in order to write?"
"No!  It wasn't."  Peg's voice went up an octave and added a singsong lilt.  "It was not necessary to go to the cliff.  People were to go wherever they thought they could get in touch with their feelings.  They were to find a place to contemplate."
"These people were your charges and you let them go wandering all over the place?"   Inez Sharp could not have been more indignant if we were all second graders.  "What's this guff about contemplating?  Contemplating what?"
Peg murmured a couple of sentences about the Enneagram.  Inez Sharp shot Peg a look that suggested the instructor needed an emergency psychiatric evaluation.  "And someone's dead because of this!"
We had to wait in the octagon room while Inez Sharp talked to each of us individually.  A small kitchen area at the rear of of the room lent semi- privacy to the interviews, although the hectoring voice of  the detective rose over the partition.
From what I could glean, Sharp was primed to buy into a verdict of accidental death.  Who wants to catch a murder case with no likely eyewitnesses and over five dozen suspects?  Oh, I knew all about disposing of cases in intake.  That's one less case for an already unwieldy load.
 But by the time my turn came to be jabbed by Inez' needle, I was starting to have a few doubts.
I told Ms. Sharp that I was an auditory witness to the incident.  I had heard the girl call out.
"Was she calling for help?"
"I didn't hear 'help.'  I heard 'no' and 'please.' It sounded like she was begging."
Although I wasn't looking to cause Ian any grief, I had no choice but to single him out as the person who heard the screams too.  Inez Sharp scratched his name in her notebook, punishing her blue Bic pen.
"Back up a minute, girly.  Just what are you trying to stir up here?" I met the glare of the hazel eyes without flinching.  "You suggesting that this was anything more than an accident?"
"I'm not suggesting anything.  But wouldn't she have yelled 'help' instead of 'please'?"
"What makes you think that?  How many cliffs have you fallen off of?"
I was feeling surly.  "In this lifetime or in all my past lives?"
Sharp let that pass.  "Dawn's response was perfectly appropriate for the situation. Someone ever hold a gun to your head?  Most of the poor devils yell something like 'please.'   Not 'help.'  Unfortunately, this poor girl probably had a few seconds to figure out what was going to happen.  Maybe the ledge she was standing on took awhile to break off.  She was out on the edge and she knew that if she so much as breathed, the whole thing would go.  She knew she was a goner."
"So you're saying that you think this was an accident."  Why, then, was the detective putting everyone through the paces?  She was probably just going through the motions of doing her job.  I've been there too.
  I had another thought.  "What about a suicide?"
My mother had always told me that I pushed too many buttons, and I saw as soon as I'd spoken that I'd pushed Inez' last.  "Look, girly, it's not my job to investigate suicides!  My job is to investigate homicides or to make determinations thereof.  And I always do my job!  I might not do it the way you want me to do it, I might not do it the way my boss wants me to do it.  But I get my job done the way I know that it has to be done."
I knew that I'd waded out too far but I took that extra step.  "Do you have a card so that I can contact you if I think of anything later?"
The detective reached into her breast pocket and slammed one down on the small kitchen table.   "I'm sitting in front of you so that you can do your thinking now!  Will you please get the hell out of my office!"
It wasn't her office but I didn't correct her.  The silent eyes of my soon to be erstwhile classmates studied me as I retreated to my spot on the floor and waited.

Chapter four

  Rao was gliding around the dining room setting out the buffet for our evening meal.  The ambulance had pulled out empty.  It won't take bodies.  A coroner, police photographers, Detective Sharp, a half-dozen uniforms, a rescue wagon, and every type of vehicle but the recycling truck had all come and gone.  Now their sole trace was the yellow police tape strung  across the cliff.  The scenic site had suddenly gotten a lot more scenic.
It goes without saying that the meal was vegetarian. The fare was standard issue for new-thought conferences: vegetable lasagna, brown rice and plenty of salad with lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers.  Rao claimed that the veggies were "organically" grown in the garden.  I had an anxiety attack when I saw that the coffee beaker had an orange handle.  If I had to go cold turkey from caffeine for the week, I might be forced to dip into the bottle of No-Doz which I had tossed in my suitcase in anticipation of the workshop putting me to sleep.  However, Rao guided me to the "caffeinated" coffee.  I have never acknowledged any other kind.
This mealtime was my first collective glimpse of all of the students of all three workshops, not counting those who didn't have the stomach to chow down.  It would be an understatement to describe the conversation as muted.
 The silent meditators assembled at a table by themselves. They seemed to have invented a  for the nonce sign language to allow salt, pepper and  water pitchers to complete their cycle around the table.
 I searched the room for any man old enough to be Anubis, but found no candidates.  I slid into a chair across the table from Ian, realizing that I had plopped down right in the midst of Anubis' group.  Since I had already crashed out of Peg Woodward's class,  I felt out of place joining the table where the Enneagram  people sat.  
I recognized the good looking blond man named Alexander Love.  I watched him scoop food onto a plate and disappear. 
"He'll be taking that plate up to Anubis,"  Ian told me.  "I don't think the old man feels well enough to come to the table."
I was sorry to hear it. I had wanted to talk with the group leader about switching to the ritual group.  On the other hand,  I wanted to see whether Peg Woodward would make good her promise to intercede.  I saw Peg from across the room.  Her tall body looked folded inward, like it had undergone some kind of implosion.
People had evidently agreed to believe that it was in bad taste to talk about the death.  Yet I could tell that inwardly, most were hunkering for every grisly detail. 
A small, thin-faced graying man whose head tottered on a fragile neck walked to the front of the salad bar.  He asked for our attention in a voice that told me that he didn't expect to get it.   His ancient woolen brown suit, worn in mid July and probably worn in a half-dozen  spots as well, was  a garment that even a moth would shun.  
"My-my fellow diners, fellows, Pilgrims, uh, uh, I'm very sorry to interrupt your meal.  I'm Simon Minor, people call me Sigh, I'm, I'm on the board of the Pilgrims, the second vice president.  Er, it is a very sad thing that has happened here today. I'd like to ask for a moment of silence for, for the young lady, Dawn, who in the dawn of her life, ah, unfortunately met with a terrible accident which proved to be fatal."
He got what he asked for.
"Amen. Uh, as I said, this is a very sad thing.  This is the first, uh, fatality that has occurred in the thirty years that this retreat and study center has been in operation.  The only exception was that we did have, I think it was in our second year, one elderly lady who went to bed after supper and, ah, well she passed away in her sleep."
The food would have been enough to do it, I thought, wishing that Minor would yield the floor to someone more major.
"Be that as it may.  I did get a chance to have a few words with Miss, uh, Detective Sharp, and she has assured me that the police view the loss of Dawn as an accidental--um, an accident of nature, and in no way an incident that was deliberately perpetrated.  So please feel free to concentrate on your studies for the duration of your stay with us, without worry, worry that some fiend--murderer--well, knowing that this was an accident.  On behalf of the Pilgrims, I apologize that this incident has certainly cast a shroud, uh, cloud, over the proceedings and if anyone feels that they are unable to continue as a result of this incident, the Pilgrims stand willing to refund the cost of this week, or if you prefer, uh, we can give you a credit in case you wish to undertake another pilgrimage in the future.  Thank you very much."
I can't say that I saw Sigh Minor walk from the room.  If I really believed in magic I would have to say that he dematerialized.  The man just melted into the woodwork. 
 Alexander Love had rejoined the table.  His blue eyes focused in on me like a zoom lens.  He had one of those annoyingly hushed voices.  It commanded your undivided attention because you had to strain your ears to hear it.  Alexander must have been sure enough of his audience to be able to pull it off. "I bumped into you today.  Literally.  I hope I didn't jar you badly.  Can we complete our introduction?"
I shook hands and told him my name. Took note of a magnificent aquamarine ring which matched  the color of his eyes.
"Jill and I rode up to Pilgrim Farm together," Ian put in, as if my merely giving my own name wouldn't hold water on its own.
"Quite so.  I'm Doctor Alexander Love. Please call me Alexander.  'Doctor Love' sounds too much like a name for a television evangelist."  He added "Don't you think so?" in a whispered mock-conspiracy.  
He paused. I believe that he actually expected me to answer.
  "What kind of doctor are you, Alexander?"
"My practice is homeopathic, of course.  Like many people you will meet here, I have only a limited amount of faith in allopathic medicine.  Not that there are not those few cases when it might or might not be appropriate."
I was tied up with the nots, and concluded by the context that "allopathic" medicine was the name of the kind of medicine you would expect at your friendly neighborhood emergency room. 
"What is your work, Jill?"  His eyes hadn't blinked yet. "Isn't it a terrible habit we Americans have of immediately trying to peg a person by inquiring about his work?"
If he know that much, I wondered why he asked.  I was spared from answering that I had been a social worker and child abuse investigator for eleven years until two days before last Christmas--Solstice to Alexander, probably. On that day, a troubled teenage girl, hoping to get sprung from the foster home where I had placed her because of familial sex abuse, told a juvenile court judge that she had been similarly abused by her social worker.  I was arrested at the courthouse, thrown into a jail cell, released on my own recognizance and suspended pending a child abuse investigation of the child abuse investigator.  The teenager admitted to having lied but my abuse case could not be dismissed until the agency director signed off on the report.  This, for some reason, she was reluctant to do.  Months passed.  The agency director resigned, or was kicked upstairs to accept a sinecure at an obscure state office.  My report was considered much too delicate a matter for an "acting" director to pick up.  I remained on suspension with pay.  Finally I got tired of fighting.  I quit.  Therefore I had no work.   I had no intention of telling Alexander anything about this. A line from an old Bob Dylan song ran through my mind, something like "Don't ask me nothin' about nothin' -- I just might tell you the trooo-ooth."
"Alexander, I've been trying to catch up with you ever since we got here!"  The voice was just short of scolding.  The speaker, a middle-aged woman with a home job hair perm, faded jeans and a black tee shirt with silver trim, wedged her chair next to Alexander's like a human slice of pie.  She  started jabbering away about something, giving me all the notice of an empty  chair.  I didn't like it but at least it got me off the hook about my livelihood.
The group interaction, though, did puzzle me.  Half of the people at this table seemed to have  history with each other predating their morning arrival at Pilgrim Farm. I caught Ian at the coffee pot and asked him about it.
"Anubis is the founder of a mystery school.  He has his own  group. Based in New York, I think. They call themselves The Eyes of Horus. Well, something like that. Don't look stricken, Tommy.  They're not devil worshipers! They do have a strong interest in  the Egyptian and other pantheons. Isis, Osiris.  You know."
I knew woefully little.  
"Anubis works with a number of students and earns money by giving these workshops.  The workshops are open to the public but you can always count on the inner core for attendance."
"Who here is  'core?'"  I wanted to know.
"Alexander, for one. Doctor Love, that is.  Holly Summerfield, the woman who just butted in.  She can be bad news, they tell me.  Sees herself as some kind of a witch.  A hedge witch, that's what she calls herself."
"I won't even ask."
"I'm told there's no love lost between her and Muriel Baxter. Muriel's the classy older woman sitting across the table from Alexander.  She's supposed to be filthy rich."   
I recognized her as the woman who had emerged from the water with the dripping skirt to announce the death of Dawn. My grandmother had always told me to look at a person's shoes to figure out their social class.  Muriel's feet weren't available to me but I could see that her handbag was a Coach.
  "She'd be an asset to an organization, I'd say.   Maybe that's why Holly can't stand her."
"Oh, I suspect there's some jealousy there.  Let's see.  There's Victor Stone.  He's the dark haired serious looking guy, very devoted to Anubis, but a little obsessive over rules and regs. We saw him down by the accident scene.  Henry Peacock.  He's the comic relief. Like a fool in a Shakespeare play.  That's about it, unless you count Dawn.  Dawn was part of Anubis' group.  She just happened to sign up for the Enneagram workshop this time.  And what a tragedy she did!"
I concurred and wondered if Ian had omitted his own name from "core."  "How did you learn so much when you only rode through the gate this morning?"
"Dr. Alexander Lovely-Looking gave me an orientation. I think he was feeling me out to see if I had membership potential."
A group within a group within a group!  "You told me about the Pilgrims to get my name on the dotted line.  You didn't tell me about all this mystery school stuff."
"I told you the center was run by the Pilgrims.  They own the land."  I had put him on the defense.  I felt mildly irked.
"It seems to me they're absentee landlords."
"Oh, they're around.  You just saw that guy Minor."
"They show up for something big.  Like a murder."  I didn't mean to say it.  I wasn't even sure I believed it. The word "murder" had been spoken louder than I'd intended.  The woman named Muriel Baxter shot me a stiff stare although at that point I doubted  she knew my name.
The dining room slowly emptied out.  Three or four "volunteers" were on cleanup duty.  Everyone had signed up to take a couple of turns.
  "I'm going out for a walk," I said to Ian,  meaning that he was invited.
"Just don't stumble off any cliffs, Jill Thomas."

Chapter five

  I love to walk at  dusk.  The chirping of the birds intensifies as they prepare to nest for the night.  The air cools down.  A breeze stirs, changing the shapes of the trees.  The flowers have a stronger scent. And I feel more alive than at any other time of the day.   Few people would advise aimless ambling around Baltimore at darkfall.  Sometimes I just carry my cup of coffee out to my back roof that doubles as a porch.
I circled around the grounds as long as there was light to see.  I was treated to the rising of a balloon-ball orange full moon.  I'm a great moon watcher.  I knew when I saw "The Glass Menagerie" that Amanda's "little silver slipper of a moon" rising over Garfinkel's Delicatessen  could not have been the crescent.  The waxing crescent sets in the evening, it doesn't rise.  The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has it right in his poem "Moonrise" when he describes his early morning sighting of the moon, "...dwindled and thinned the the fringe of a fingernail held to a candle."  Hopkins must have been a moon watcher too.
My watch chirped nine when I ambled toward the door of the erstwhile monastery that housed the parlor, dining room, library, some of the classrooms and the ice cube sized bedrooms.  For the first time, I noticed that the sprawling width of the building had a small wing on each size, the length of a pair of bedrooms if you alloted one of the double windows for each room.
A figure floated across my path in the moonlight.  I recognized the supplicating gait of Rao.  The man possessed at least one aspect of the Christian deity:  omnipresence.
"I have been to the meditation room.  I have prayed very hard for the woman who has had the accident,"  he said.  His voice rose on the word "accident."
Rao was in that meditation room so much that I wondered how anyone else ever got a chance to get in. My reply was only slightly more effusive than "Oh, that's nice."
"You know, some people here, they have been saying that this is not an accident, that this is some kind of a murder.  They should not say.  I believe it can be nothing but an accident."
I could have asked for the source of his belief but I didn't think there was one.  I felt like my generator had already flamed out and switched to its emergency backup.  Better to conserve my energy.
People had scattered, I wondered where. I went inside.
 A small group sat sipping tea in the library.  The room was straight out of Victorian England. The wallpaper was a light blue print. High glass-doored mahogany bookcases hugged the walls, interspersed by a pair of overstuffed chintz sofas.  A large round table took up half the floor space of the room.  Four or five worn brown leather chairs were pulled up to the table. Over the table hung a chandelier.  Ancient floor lamps stood near the sofas. Simon Minor, the bona fide Pilgrim,  invited me to pour myself a cup of herbal tea.  I peered at the glass encased books, trying to get the bead on the library's theme.  
"This is one of the most extensive occult libraries in the state," Minor said.  He was obviously more confident discussing occult libraries than girls falling off cliffs:  his stammer had disappeared.
For the first time, I noticed Peg Woodward.  I would not have entered the room had I spied her first.  Nor would I have taken the library to be a nesting ground for Victor Stone and Alexander Love. I had presumed that this pair would be nesting near Anubis, wherever that might be.
Minor stared out a screened window into the moonlit darkness. "There are a lot of elementals out there," he remarked to no one in particular. "Especially the salamanders.  You can see the tiny flickering of lights."  
I joined him at the window. The air was filled with fireflies as well as the tiny red spots that form in the visual field when someone stares too intensely into the darkness.
"They're attracted to places like this,"  he continued.  "Holy places. Places where people assemble to participate in the work of the Light."
I wasn't about to ask anyone to explain to me what an elemental was.  "What is your theory of elementals?"  I asked Simon Minor.
His answer sent my blood running cold.  "They are creatures in search of ensoulment."
Peg Woodward looked up.  "I wonder if there will be any manifestations tonight.  This is my thirteenth time at Pilgrim Farm and I've always experienced a manifestation."
I reasoned that the word was being used with a different sense than the way I'd employed it.  
"One night I woke up and seven silver clad creatures were dancing around my bed."
"Tell me what you were drinking before you went to bed," Alexander Love said, mock-confiding, the voice you use when you whisper a wondrous secret to a child.  If I tried to speak like that, people would just keep on talking and drown me out.
Victor Stone clasped and unclasped his hands three times.  He combed his fingers through his dark hair. He reminded me of a neurotic cat, one of those cats that will go on licking itself for a half hour if you dare to ruffle its fur by stroking it. "What did you do?" he asked  Peg.
"I simply sang, 'Silver creatures of the night, Silver creatures of the Light, Dare you come into my bed, Dare you dance upon my head.'  And they vanished."
I had learned what a manifestation was.
Muriel Baxter moved across the room as though she were walking through a reception line.  I suspected that she always moved that way.  She sure didn't fit the image for Pilgrim Farm. Possibly excepting Holly Summerfield, I hadn't seen anyone who looked grungy, but Muriel could have stepped from a total body care salon.  She was sixty-plus with the figure of a seventeen year old model.  If the same beautician had done my hair, it would have looked like a crow's nest before I had reached my car.  Every wave in Muriel's soft, silver gray hair was where it was supposed to be.
A grandfather clock in the hall near the library door played out the Westminster chimes and bonged ten times.
"I'm going up to bed," I announced.  I think I mumbled something about insomnia. That was a new plague for me.  It dated back to the incident on the job.  I would be lucky to sleep three hours. But  I could think of nothing in the world more inviting than the narrow mattress which awaited me on the top floor of the building.
The ceiling light was impossible. Its one hundred watt bulb transformed the cell-bedroom into an interrogation room.  The small shaded reading lamp on the bare bedside table was the safer bet.  The wafer thin mattress rested on a coil spring which squeaked with every move.  One straight backed chair and a crude wardrobe completed the furnishings.
My room lay near one end of a long corridor, just a couple of doors from the "U" wing .  It was the existence of this "U" wing which led me to turn off even the desk lamp  lest someone see me pulling off my clothes. Curtains were  one amenity that the Pilgrims thought we could do without.
 With the lights out, I who had sought my own privacy became a voyeur.  From my window, I could look directly into a third floor wing room.  I spied a figure of an old man draped in a black robe. He held a knife in his right hand.  I know that ritualists call this knife an atheme, but to me it is just a knife.  The man's left hand held aloft a long stick of incense.  He began walking around the room in a circle although I don't know how. His room must have been bigger than mine. He was making drawings in the air with the knife. I didn't need any of it.  I changed my mind about reading  my mystery.  To me a mystery means Ruth Rendell or Martha Grimes, not what was happening on the third floor wing.  I left the light off and flounced around on the mattress.  I might not get comfortable but I did hope to get asleep.
I had just drifted off when I fell into a dream that someone was knocking on my door.  I sat up.  I didn't think my dream had gone lucid.
"Miss Thomas?  Are you still awake?"
It was a woman's voice.  A genteel voice.  No one opens doors for strangers anymore but I supposed that this was different. I clicked on the lamp and pushed open the door to face Muriel Baxter.
"Oh, you were asleep!"  Muriel's face blushed  red as blood.  "I'm not accustomed to making social calls after the hostess' bedtime."  Still, she entered without asking and quickly closed the door behind her. I jumped back into my bed.
"Please excuse--well, I see I'm intruding.  But I've no choice.  You're Jill Thomas?  No one has properly introduced us.  I've been asking around to learn which one you were.  You're the one I need to speak with.  They told me that you were the only one to stand up to that horrible creature of a homicide detective.  That was no accident, Miss Thomas.  That was murder."
I truly hoped this was a dream.  "You can call me Jill."
"Muriel.  No accident.  You didn't think so, either."
She pronounced it "I-ther."  Her intonation was assertive despite her cringing at  her recent  breach of  Miss Manners.
"I heard you say so at dinner.  You said 'murder.'"
I untangled myself from the bed covers and swung my feet onto the floor, the better to put myself on even footing with my caller..  It is awkward to hold your own in a conversation while lying in bed.  My heart went out to hospital patients who have to discuss life and death issues with their doctors from the disadvantage of a prone state.  "I guess I  have to plead agnosticism.  I don't know whether this was an accident or not.  One can not know.  Or at least I can't.  I don't know the facts."
"I can give you a few facts," Muriel said.  "For starters, I know Dawn."
"Oh?"
"Dawn and I both live in Philadelphia.  I've known her for a little less than two years.  We share an interest in the higher mysteries.  I'm the one who proposed that she be admitted as a probationer in Abel Meyer's group."
Abel Meyer.  The name had much less mystique than "Anubis."
"Unfortunately, my assessment of her ability to pursue this kind of study proved to be a poor one."  Muriel's speech was crisp and severe. "I failed to recognize that she was a very immature girl.  She was always having a family problem or a boyfriend problem.  Or an occupational one.  She also had a number of phobias, one of which was a dreadful fear of heights."
"She told you so?"  My investigative interest was stirred.  Eleven years is a long time,  you get inculcated into thinking a certain way.
"It was very obvious.  We traveled together to New York once for an equinox celebration.  Dawn insisted on a hotel room that was no higher than the second floor.  It was then that she told me about her fear.  She had other phobias, too.  She couldn't take a restaurant seat where she felt boxed in. We got caught up in the crush of a sale in Macy's and she ran out into Thirty-Fourth Street screaming. She was a very peculiar bird!  But my point is that in no way would Dawn have ventured near the edge of a cliff.  She was either pushed, or else someone hypnotized her!"
I don't want to say categorically that I can not be hypnotized but I never have been.  I remember Ian trying to hypnotize me once.  I hadn't been able to stop giggling.
"Are there any hypnotists around here?"
"Any of them in Anubis' group--of which Dawn was a part--would be capable.  Anubis teaches hypnosis."
"But Dawn was in the Enneagram Studies," I said, wanting to know where Muriel would go with that.
"For this week, yes.  But she is one of Anubis' private students.  I don't know what she was doing in Enneagram Studies but that was like Dawn.  She was probably just trying to show her perversity by registering for the other class.  Or maybe she had a genuine interest in personality theory. Lord knows, she didn't have much of one."
"Would Abel Meyer--Anubis--have seen this as a rejection?  Gotten angry at Dawn's passing up his class?" 
Muriel herself got angry.  "Abel Meyer is an enlightened soul!  He has moved beyond ego.  The Dawns of this world have no ability to affect him!"
"Muriel," I asked,  "why are you telling me all this?  Why did you come specifically to me?"
 "Because at least you're open to the possibility that this was not an accident. In the event any other accidents happen around here, we'll know it wasn't the first."
I wondered if she expected another accident.  "Did you tell Detective Sharp what you just told me?"
"Detective Sharp is not the kind of person that invites confidences about the work that we do here.  And it isn't as though I have knowledge of who might have been instrumental in Dawn's going over the cliff. "
We studied each other in silence.
"I do believe that the answer lies in Abel Meyer's group."  Muriel said.
"Would anyone there want Dawn out of the way? And why? Surely not just because she wasn't one of the shinning stars in the group?"
Muriel thrust her chin a little higher and met my eyes.  "Dawn might not have been the person they wanted out of the way."
I waited for an explanation.
"Somebody had plied her with poison. I'm talking about a poison secret, Miss Thomas.  Knowing that she was not an adequate vessel to contain it.  Knowing that she  would spill it over and that it would cause a lot of mischief in the group."
All this was getting to be a bit much.  I had always thought of myself as a  straightforward person.  And right then I was a very tired person.
"I  won't take any more of your time, Jill.  You'll need a good night's sleep for these long days.  I've said as much as I can say."
Then she asked to use my bathroom.  That tiny closet of a facility was  shared by an as yet unmet occupant of  the adjoining room.  It contained  a sink, commode and a somewhat rusted shower stall.  
"Hellish diuretics,"  Muriel mumbled, answering my unvoiced question of why she did not wait a half minute and use her own facility.
Finally she left.  I used the bathroom one more time myself, even giving my teeth a cursory final brushing.  I could not brush the bad taste out of my mouth.
I was eager for my second go at dreamland.  I tried to guide my consciousness toward having a dream that would result in clarity.  My other wish was to wake up in Baltimore to discover that this whole day had been a dream.
I propped myself up in the darkness and glanced out the narrow window one last time.
The third floor light was out.
Outside, a dark hooded figure, cradling a votive light in both hands, walked like a sleepwalker toward the meditation room.

Chapter six

  I usually wake up in the morning when a switch clicks in my brain.  No matter how many times I turn over and drift back into sleep for one last dream, I know that when it's right to get up, the switch will activate. My limbs will start flailing around in search of oxygen.  After that, there's no getting back to sleep.
My switch never did reset when I became unemployed.  Let's face it, there's no need for the switch to click at six a.m. anymore.  But it still does.
This morning the switch must have had a short.  I whimsically wondered whether Muriel, in her nocturnal visit, had released a magic sleeping potion.  I woke from a dreamless night to the bright sunlight, to footsteps and murmurings in the hallway.  So much for my hope of catching Ian for a few minutes before breakfast.  
 A list of optional pre-breakfast activities had been posted outside the dining room There was a sunrise meditation group, a Tai Chi group, a silent-walking group.  I wasn't interested in any of these. Before breakfast also meant before coffee.  I wouldn't be functional. Ian  was bound to have taken off for one of these groups. He was an even earlier riser than I was. He often spoke of being awake until two or three in the morning.  I assumed that the surfed through the night on his computer. But the only time he missed a sunrise was a rainy day.
By the time I hit the dining room, breakfast was in full swing. Ian was ensconced between Alexander Love and a glum looking Victor Stone.  Holly Summerfield, the hedge witch, sat across from Victor
I grabbed the last pancake, spooned some fruit salad into a small bowl and dropped my dishes at an empty place.
"She never was my idea of too bright," Holly was saying.  "But I did give her credit for having better sense than to fall off a cliff."
"She was the pure-hearted, innocent fool of the tarot deck,"  Alexander said in his arresting voice that both chided and silenced Holly.  "The fellow with the little white dog who represents intuitive trust of the universe.  The card shows him on the verge of stepping off the cliff and plunging into the abyss, with full faith that the universe will protect him.  Excuse me.  I need to take breakfast up to Anubis."
Ian explained that the "old man" liked to spend his morning in quiet contemplation.  He avoided all the breakfast chatter and clatter.
"Clatter" reminded me that this was my turn on cleanup crew.  It was the worst possible day.  I knew I had to catch Anubis about transferring before the class actually began.  I found a tray and began snatching dishes from the table the second that the last bites had been taken.
 I slackened my pace when I approached Peg Woodward and her unused fork. The sharp hawk-like features had drooped.  I found new meaning in the term crestfallen.  Peg raised her head and gave me a vacuous glance.
I felt self-conscious enough to blubber, "Were you able to see Abel..." and then recovered to say, "Did you speak with Anubis about my transferring to the ritual group?"
"Mmmmm"
I took this to mean yes.  Since she'd scarcely eaten,  she couldn't be licking her chops.
I dumped a tray of dirty dishes into Rao's kitchen sink.  He didn't seem fully conscious.  He was mumbling something under his breath which sounded like "Shanti Shanti Shanti." A newspaper on a chair was carefully folded at a selected article. I started to read.
            PILGRIM FARM FALL PROVES FATAL
    A 20-year-old woman plummeted off a cliff to her death at Pilgrim
 Farm yesterday,amidst rumors that she may have been walking the grounds in a trance.  An unidentified police source, while ruling out foul play, suggested that Pilgrim Farm might more apt be called "Funny Farm."  "So far as supervision of the residents, there is much to be desired.  I don't know why the classroom teacher would send young people out of the classroom to roam the grounds without providing a thorough orientation.  This death could have been prevented."
 Identification was withheld pending notice of next of kin but this paper has learned that the deceased is Dawn Vanderbosch of Philadelphia, the daughter of prominent attorney Benjamin Vanderbosch.
  Pilgrim Farm had just changed its name to Lawsuit City.  "What do you think?" I waved the paper at Rao.
His flashing onyx eyes expressed his anger.  "The papers should not write such things.  This is not fair to the Pilgrims."
I had always supposed that the loyal, faithful employee syndrome still existed although you didn't find much of it at the line social worker level where I came from.  It was more of an "us against the bumbling bureaucratic sawmill."  Still, I thought that Rao was carrying the act a little too far.  Or maybe he was a Pilgrim.  Maybe any lawsuit could stretch out its tentacles and reach him.
"Are you one?" I asked, wondering if this was the kind of question that dare not be answered.
"I and also my father and his father before him."  
He made it sound almost biblical. Or congenital.  Stacks of dirty plates sat asking to be washed.  I went through the motions with the first stack and then told Rao hasta.
  I twisted the building inside out in my mind. I knew that the figure I had seen in the third floor window last night was Anubis. I was able to locate his room by matching my bedroom window sighting with the rooms on the wing.
  Eleven years of knocking on strange doors had extinguished any shyness.  I knocked three times.  Three is a magical number.   The door opened about ten degrees. A narrow swatch of Alexander Love filled up the crack.
"Is Anubis in?  Mr. Meyer?"
"Dr. Meyer is resting,"  Alexander answered, sotto voco.  "Dr. Meyer is preparing for his class in a half-hour."
This was a different kind of preparation. And probably a different kind of doctor.
  "I  need to catch him before the class, to clear up my registration."  
The word "registration"  worked magic.  So Alexander Love had bureaucratic tendencies too.  He bade me wait a second.  Through the ajar door I could see an old gentleman with a blood pressure cuff around his arm.
"Come in, my child. I've been waiting for you!  Come in and talk to me."   The voice was sonorous and seductive.   Although Anubis spoke impeccable, English.  I doubted that he was American born.  The word "waiting" had no sound of "wading," it was more like "wait-ting."  
He rose to take my hand. His height was imposing.  His leathery face betrayed his age as seventy-something.  His hair, more silvery blond than gray, was close clipped. The eyes, surprisingly, were a light hazel. Anubis wore a trim mustache, scarcely wider than a toothbrush.
He gestured toward the blood pressure cuff, still maintaining intense eye contact.  "Alexander likes to watch over my health.  I myself am not concerned.  I have no fear of being dead.  What is your name, please?"
I told him.
"And you, Jill, do you entertain such fears?"
I admitted I hadn't given it a lot of thought until yesterday.  I glanced around the room.  It was twice as large as my own.  There was floor space for a dresser.  Its top had been converted into an  altar.  Incense had recently been burned.  Not the small cones nor the fragile, fragrant jasmine or sandalwood  sticks, but the powdered variety which has to be sprinkled over a simmering circle of charcoal.
A bundle of about fifty sticks had been tossed around on the altar-dresser.  A college course in Eastern Religions helped me to recognize these as yarrow stalks, used for the casting of the I Ching.
"Did the oracle have a good message for you today, Dr. Meyer?" I asked, knowing all the while that I was just showing off my knowledge.
"The oracle told me that a student would come to me and express interest in my teaching."
I admitted that I did hope to transfer into his workshop if this was acceptable to him.  I don't know that I believed the oracle had spoken but I was coming to doubt that Peg Woodward had.
"You must tell me, Jill, what you seek to attain through my teaching."  Still those eyes didn't waver.  I was beginning to feel like a grail knight being sent out for the first test. Or the frog who had to give the exact password in order to become a prince and win the princess. Ian had told me that it is much the same with computers.
I had sense enough to know that I'd better not wear the same stripes I'd bared to  Peg Woodward yesterday.  "I want to attain self knowledge," I heard myself saying.
"And why, Jill, do you want to attain self knowledge?"  He spoke kindly, sadly.
"To help others, I guess."
Anubis nodded his head slowly and seriously. Long seconds of silence passed, silence that not even I dared to violate.
  "I find you acceptable."
 If I were lucky, I would have time to run to the dining room for one final cup of java before class began.  
Chapter seven
  The former lifetime of the ritual group's classroom could not be disguised.  It was once the monastery's chapel.  True, the large room had been denuded of statues, altars, confession booths or anything to suggest its former religious persuasion. But white marble steps led up to the space where the chancel had once stood, and stained glass windows remained intact.  These windows gave the whole room a peculiar lighting that should have evoked images of a celestial realm.
  In actuality, the effect was a ghostly glow. The rich panes depicted artfully tooled images of Christian saints. Far from bearing beneficent facial expressions, the majority had been bestowed a stricken look as though they stood on the threshold of their martyrdom.
 The domed front of the large space had once been the chapel's sanctuary. The roof of the nave was arched. The walls were painted a deep peach. The chapel stood at the distant end from the dining room, as though eating and praying, nurturance for body and for soul, had to be kept as far apart as possible.  
At least there were chairs, not cushions scattered on the floor.  The wooden chairs were not quite arranged in the democratic circle that had prevailed in Peg Woodward's room.  Part of the circle was wide open.  And in that wide open space, sitting in  a large upholstered chair in front of the sanctuary, sat Abel "Anubis"  Meyer.
I entered the room with Ian but purposely chose a seat as far away from him as possible.  I did not want to leech myself to him.
The class began filtering in. Anubis totally ignored us.  He looked like he was observing the mandatory moment of silence. His eyes were closed.  With both index fingers he was massaging the middle of his forehead, in the area that some people call the third eye and I call the frontal sinuses.  Alexander Love arranged his chair just to the right of Anubis--not quite on par with the leader but somewhat more elevated than any of the others. 
 Muriel Baxter strode into the room.  Despite her visit to my bedroom last night, she looked through me as though our paths had never crossed in this world.  Her dress would have better suited a power breakfast than Pilgrim Farm.
  Victor Stone, whose facial expression never got anywhere near a smile, nodded at me and frowned.. He eased himself into an empty seat near Alexander.  I saw that he had a nervous habit of plucking out  eyebrow hairs with his fingers. He was the only man in the room wearing a business suit.
Holly Summerfield, wearing a long willowy skirt in earth tones, stood in front of my chair.  "You're in my seat."
"I didn't know there were assigned seats," I said.
"I sat there yesterday."  
"Oh, you sat here once.  Then, no question, this is your seat. We don't want to play musical chairs."  I stood up, hoping my sarcasm showed. 
Ian sat humming a few bars from the overture of some somber German opera.  I didn't know which one but I was certain that Ian could have reproduced the whole libretto if he'd wanted to. He shot me a "mind your manners"  look.
Anubis was staring at me again with those hazel eyes which resembled the eyes of my neighbor's sleek gray weimaraner.  The dog was said to be a biter.  I hoped Meyer was not.
  "Jill."  He pronounced  my name like he was studying it for sound and vibration.  "Jill Thomas. What sign of the zodiac are you, Jill?"
"Pisces,"  I told him.
"A water sign.  Then you would want to seat yourself along the west wall, with the Cancers and Scorpios.  Fire signs, Aries, Leo, Sag,  along the south wall.  Air in the east:  Gemini, Libra, Aquarius. And the earth signs sit in the north.  That's Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn."
"Excuse me, Anubis." a bearded fellow in a bright yellow tee shirt called out.  "I was born on the cusp, right between Virgo and Libra.  Where do you want me?"
"Where do you want to sit, Mr. Peacock?  Does your soul tell you that you are more earth or more air?"
Everyone tittered.
"We don't have equal numbers in any event, so arrange yourselves as best you can.  The important thing is that you understand the energies of the elements."
I wondered whether I had been too hasty in dismissing the silent meditation group as my second choice. 
 Before I could develop this thought, a pale blond woman. of about twenty-five practically fell into the room, sobbing. It was an entrance worthy of any mid-afternoon TV soap.    The crier made no effort to sit, but instead took center stage.
"I'm sorry."  She buried her hands in her face for a few seconds, then addressed the group with the exaggerated gestures and voice range of a character in a play. "I had a very upsetting experience during the watch last night."
Abel "Anubis" Meyer stood up and led her to a chair next to his own.  His voice was soothing and hypnotic.  It was all right to cry, he told her.  She should take her time.  "Tell us all what happened on the watch, Diana,  when you are ready."
"I saw the head of a deer, all covered in blood!"  
"You saw this in your mind's eye?" Anubis prodded.
The woman named Diana shook her head.  "No.  It floated in front of the little window.  It seemed suspended there.  Then I felt like it was hanging in space in front of me, in the meditation room itself!  I shut my eyes and when Henry came to relieve me, it was gone."
"She did look shook up when I came in," Henry Peacock confirmed.
"What hour did you have for the watch?"  Holly Summerfield asked.
"Two a.m. to three."
I was beginning to grow apprehensive about this watch.  I wondered what everyone was supposed to be watching.  
It was as though I had spoken out loud. Anubis looked directly at me and answered.  "There are negative forces out there, Jill, practitioners of the dark arts, empowered by the destructive god forms that they evoke in their rituals.  These forces always stand ready to attack the forces of good.  Black magicians keep track of our movements.  They know that we are at Pilgrim Farm for our study course.  In our waking hours, they can not harm us, they can not penetrate our wills. But during the hours that all of us are asleep, there is vulnerability to a psychic attack.  We protect ourselves by keeping watch from eleven p.m. until six a.m. We take hourly shifts.  You've seen the small meditation room through the garden just beyond the stream?   That is where we keep the watch.  Which reminds me that there are a couple of hours left tonight that no one has signed up for.  We need volunteers.  I remind everyone that the watch is strictly voluntary."
 He redirected his attention to Diana.  "The Grecian goddess Artemis, whom we also know as Diana, is the goddess of the hunt.  The protectress of women.  She is often seen with her consort, the beautiful deer.  Could it be, Diana, that the goddess wanted to make a visit to her namesake?"
Diana considered this interpretation.  "It didn't seem like that."
Muriel Baxter raised her hand.  To say that her voice was educated didn't quite convey the quality I want to describe. She spoke in an aristocratic cadence that matched her bearing. "It might well be that the goddess Diana wished to show her sorrow over the death of the young woman. Dawn."  Having spoken in cool spring water syllables, she turned from Diana disgusted, like her nose had picked up a stench.
Anubis seemed suddenly stricken.  It was as though he were feeling the pain of Dawn's death throes.  "A tragic incident!" he gasped.
I noted that he didn't say "accident." 
The watch sign-up sheet started around the circle.  I held it longer than I needed to, trying to memorize the names of the people in the group.  I counted twelve names including my own. Anubis had exempted himself from the watch. I was willing to allow him that dispensation.  He was far from being a young man.  I was surprised not to find the name of Victor Stone on the list.  He seemed like such a true-believer type that I had expected him to take a quadruple shift.
  Ian had shamelessly scribbled his name next to "eleven p.m.," the first watch hour, even though that night owl seldom logged off his computer before three.  He had even brought a laptop to Pilgrim Farm.  Probably he wanted to get the watch over with and be settled in front of the computer screen by the after-midnight hours.  I'm told that that's when the chat rooms get going in full swing. 
 I scrawled my signature next to "four a.m."    I'd have to fiddle around with setting the alarm on my Casio.
Holly Summerfield's voice was throaty and just short of hostile.  "I don't think the goddess Diana graced anyone with a visit.  That sounds more like Gabriel, up to his dirty tricks!"
Uneasy looks traveled around the circle. Anubis himself paled.
A thin-voiced woman named Sandy wanted to know who Gabriel was.  I knew better than to ask.
  The group eventually settled down to the work it had traveled to Pilgrim Farm to do. Anubis said that he wanted to teach everyone a system of self-hypnosis, with his usual caveat that participation in any activity was voluntary.  "You must only do what you will. Let your will be your guide." 
 He went on to ask about the difference between wanting something and willing it.  "Jill, what do you think?"
I thought that I didn't like this being called on.  I said, "Your true will might be to lose five pounds.  But you might see a piece of cake and want it.  In eating the cake, you've gratified your want at the expense of your will power."
He pondered this answer.  "You have understood," he remarked in the peculiar use of the present-perfect tense which he sometimes employed.
I had no such understanding of the value of self-hypnosis. I was grateful when the question was put to the group.
"Self hypnosis, like any altered state, can lead us to realizations that we might not ordinarily be able to access," Victor Stone said in a voice  as somber as an intensive care doctor discussing a prognosis. Then, apropos nothing, he suddenly shouted loudly, "Isis! Osiris! Horus!"  
I was jarred by the outcry. If he had been anywhere near an airport gate, he likely would have been quietly escorted away.  But no one in the Eyes seemed to think that anything unusual had happened.
"Self hypnosis would be good to use while you're waiting for the dentist," Henry Peacock added, waiting for applause or laughter.
Diana, who must have realized that she had missed her exit cue, found the only empty chair in the room, the one  next to me.  I've participated in too many groups where, if there was only one empty chair in the room, it would always be the seat next to me. I welcomed Diana with a smile.  She seemed much more interested in ogling Alexander.
Anubis, speaking in his odd but accentless English, started the hypnotic induction and backward countdown from ten to one.  We were supposed to have our eyes affixed to a piece of jewelry.  As I wore none, I closed my eyes and settled for a mental diamond ring.  Almost immediately I felt a body fall across my lap.  I didn't want to cause a stir.   People were halfway to being hypnotized and it's supposed to be harmful to jar people out of that state.  Still,  I had a right to see who or what had invaded my space.  I opened my eyes.  Diana must have fallen over like a tenpin at the first "relax" that Anubis had uttered.  I tried gently to ease her to a sitting position in her own chair.  
Alexander Love was the resident rescuer.  He charged to my side like a pouncing cat.  Diana tottered in a swoon on her own chair, in danger of doing another lap landing or, as I'd hoped, slide off in the opposite direction.  With quiet efficiency, Alexander had carried her out of the chapel.  The hypnotic induction went undisturbed.
  While everyone else seemed to be under, I used my time to think about the bloody deer's head in the meditation room.  I wondered if the meditators who had followed Diana had seen it too.  There were more logical explanations than the visitation from the goddess of the hunt.  The wooded area and the water running through the property would be a magnet for deer.  How could such terrain not be, the way people "developed" the habitats of all the wild creatures, so that they were forced to live in peopled suburbs, traversing roads and dodging cars?  A place with as much acreage as Pilgrim Farm would be a regular wildlife preserve. The poor creature had probably gotten struck on the highway  and was running around in its death throes.  I made a note to search the area around the meditation room for bloodstains.  Perhaps if I followed the blood, I would find the carcass.  
  My reverie was interrupted by murmurs and stirs and scraping of chairs.  People began emerging from their trances.  Alexander was leading Diana back into the chapel.
Muriel mumbled something about certain people not being "suitable for this work."
 Anubis said the words that I was afraid I would never hear.  "Let's take our break."

Chapter eight

  I decided to zero in on Diana. Although I'm no good at small talk, I tried to hook on to her as we left the room.  I was over solicitous about her swoon. I radiated concern about her experience in the meditation room. 
Muriel Baxter passed us. She glanced at me blankly, but she glared at Diana with an expression which I could only read as undisguised hatred. The hallway suddenly felt frostier.  Even allowing that all of Diana's drama might not have been Muriel's thing,that look on her face had sure rocked my clock.
"How did you happen to take this workshop?" I asked Diana. I braced myself for another deification of Anubis but it didn't come.
"I'm an actress.  I thought that studying ritual might help me to get into my roles."   Diana gave a bored yawn.
I had no intention of asking for her resume. "Who is this Gabriel that Holly Summerfield was talking about?"
"Gabriel? I haven't a clue. Oh, excuse me, I need to catch up with Alexander...."
I knew that I couldn't compete with that.  I also knew that Diana didn't have the information I wanted.  She was not one of the core.

Ian came up and slipped an arm around me.  "So, whaddidya think?"
I admitted that I was well out of my league, with talk of dark arts, psychic attacks and seating by zodiac sign.  "Let's head down toward that meditation room.  I want to see if there's blood from that deer."
As we strolled through the garden I told him about Muriel's late night visit. "She said 'poison.'  Dawn knew something that was damaging to the group--or to some of the members of the group.  Muriel thinks that's why she was killed.  She also said Dawn wouldn't have ventured anywhere near the edge of a cliff because she was terrified of heights."
Ian rubbed his head. "Did Muriel say whether anyone else was  in possession of this poison secret?"
"She didn't say. Odd, she described Dawn as immature.  Said she had a lot of personal problems.  Dawn doesn't sound like the type of person who would be entrusted with a shattering secret."   I wondered to myself what type would.
"Unless," Ian said, pointing his finger the way he does when he thinks a two hundred watt light bulb has gone on.  "Unless--she was being set up.  Unless someone told her some dirt, knowing that she was exactly the type who would track it all over the place.  It's like walking through a house with dogshit on your shoe."
"Then why push her over the cliff?"  I asked.
 Obviously the person who told her the dirt had the exact opposite intention from the pusher. That person wanted her to run her mouth and the one who pushed her off the cliff wanted to shut her up."
"Two separate malefactors? With opposing intentions?"  I was ready to give up the whole problem.  Another aspect of the puzzle made me skeptical.
  "Don't get your back up, I don't know if you've eaten everything that Anubis has put on our plate or not.  But we're talking about a group whose belief system is out there on the fringe.  We're talking ritual magic!  So what kind of secret information could Dawn have been carrying that would make things any more disreputable?"
Ian took my point.  "I wish I knew.  These occult groups are notorious for warring factions.  As far back as l900, the poet William Butler Yeats stood in a doorway of a Golden Dawn lodge on Blythe Road in London, refusing entrance to Aleister Crowley.  The police were called and everything."
I was impressed by this grasp of history.  It hinted the answer to my question about the depth of Ian's involvement.
We poked around the immediate area of the tiny meditation room.  I peered into the one small window, duplicating the presumed action of the stricken deer.  I wasn't surprised to find Rao in the room.  For a summer employee, he sure hogged that facility.
"I doubt that you're going to find a trace of an existent deer," Ian said.  "What Diana probably saw was a thought form.  This Gabriel, whoever he is, had probably visualized the image so strongly that he was able to get it to materialize."
"Maybe Diana simply had a hallucination."  I offered my alternative explanation.  "People do, you know.  Under the right circumstances, it's easily done.  Many people who have spent time in hospital intensive care units report having them."
"Not everything has a scientific explanation," Ian persisted.
"I want you to help me find out the story on Gabriel."
"I'll see what I can do."  His voice, when he spoke, sounded grim.  "But I wouldn't recommend that you start asking a lot of questions about Dawn's death, just like you've landed another child abuse investigation.  Stay out of it, Tommy.  For all you know, the death was an accident.  And you don't know these people up here."
 I had learned through the years that his calling me by my nickname wasn't the best sign.  I was going to be humored, at best. I wasn't convinced Ian would act on my request. How well did he himself know the workshop participants?
For all I knew, Ian might be part of my problem.
  I had fifteen minutes before the next class section.  I couldn't think of a better way to use those minutes than to retreat to the nurturance of my little womb-room and its lumpy bed. I sprawled on my back and began to fantasize about all the generations of young seminarians who had lain down on top these same springs..I could visualize these men--more likely, boys-- lying in the still darkness, holding unpitying wrestling contests with their consciences over arcane sins. Sins perhaps not of action but merely of thought or intent.  Some, through the years, might have lost their religion in this room.  Some might have been driven to suicidal despair.  Most likely, thousands of hours of masturbation had occurred on the creaking bedspring.
I got up and peered down at the room on the wing.  The figures of Anubis and Muriel Baxter were outlined against the window pane.
I have always been disdainful of eavesdroppers. Living in modest apartments all my adult life, I have run into my share of them,  idle people  craning their noses out of chain locked doors. I once had a neighbor who used to listen through the wall with a stethoscope. None of these thoughts stopped me from bolting down the hall and down two flights of stairs, headed for Anubis' room. I was convinced that the conversation in that room would give me answers to some of my questions.
  I put my ear to the door but the voices didn't carry.  All the time, I was praying that no one from inside would yank that door open.   I would have literally dropped in.
I remembered that Anubis' room had the same small  inner door that mine did. He would have that identical semi-private bathroom favored by old fashioned dormatories and summer camps. I had once been sent to summer camp--I had stayed three days and acted up so badly that my mother had to come and take me out. The bathroom there had been shared by the camper who occupied the adjoining room.
 I tiptoed down the hall and tapped on the door next to Anubis' room.  When my knock went unanswered, I pushed the door open. The room looked untenanted. The dresser top was bare.  The bed was made. I stole into the bathroom and applauded myself on my correct guess.  This was the bathroom that Anubis shared.  I might as well have been in the room with him and Muriel Baxter.
Muriel's voice was emphatic.  "Of course the poor child couldn't keep her mouth shut.  It didn't matter to them what Dawn knew.  I was the one that the information was meant for. Because I'm the one who has the power to act."
"And will you?"
"How can I just go on?  I have to live with myself, Abel.  We could both be destroyed."
I noted that Muriel had the privilege of calling Anubis the name on his birth certificate.
"So many years ago, my dear Muriel.  And what about all the work we shall have completed together through the years? The magical work?  What about the Order itself!"
My emotions went from elation to dread in three seconds. Someone had entered the bedroom.  I had not taken the precaution of locking myself into the bathroom from both sides.  The footsteps were headed in a straight line to my hideaway.  Dr. Alexander Love pulled open the door and discovered me sitting on his toilet bowl.  He had caught me redhanded.
"What are you doing here?"  The soft monotone had grown severe.  "Spying?"
Even now, I get embarrassed in recounting this moment.  In my years as a child abuse worker, I had committed some brazen deeds. I begged, threatened and cajoled my way through many doors, my black notebook being my only shield. If the family tried to confine me to the first floor, I would ask to use the bathroom.  I could rationalize my subterfuge.  Not now.  I simply felt humiliated, like in the dreams where you find you've gone outside and are only wearing your slip.  
I looked up at the blue eyes and again noticed the matching stone in the ring. "Don't be afraid," Alexander said, his lulling tone returning.  "Just tell me what this is all about."
His intimate voice, his unflinching eyes invited confidence, so much so that I wanted to spill out the whole story. I managed to retrench.  "Oh, hello,  I'd come to see Anubis.   I'd thought this was his room."
"Do you make this a practice?  To enter people's rooms and use their lavatory?"
"No, I don't."  I dropped my voice an octave, matching his own lowered tone. "I'd thought it would be okay to wait for Anubis here.  I thought it was an unassigned room.   Then I had a slight--biological emergency.  I'm sorry. "
"I'll take you to Anubis."  This wasn't the result I wanted but I theorized that it was too late to matter.  Alexander would certainly tell Anubis about locating me in the can.
"I think I can find my own way now.  Or maybe I could ask you.  I'm very interested in the group, Eyes of Horus.  Is there any literature I can read?"
His suspicions seemed to abate although I still didn't know whether he saw me as innocent.  He pulled out an expensive gold-colored pen and began jotting book titles on a sheet of paper.  "There's Budge's 'The Book of the Dead.'  Mead's 'Thrice Greatest Hermes.'"
Still working to lower my pulse rate, I said,  "I want those titles, but what I was hoping to get was something on the group itself."
He acknowledged his error and reached into a dresser drawer for a thin magazine.  It looked like a homemade effort:  a cheap printer and staples.  "We manage to get out a magazine every three months or so.  The current issue is overdue, what with this and that. This is last year's but it should give you a pretty good idea of what we're about."  He glanced at his watch.  We're running late for class."
I thanked him and took the magazine. I scurried ahead of him, knowing that we wouldn't be later than Anubis himself.  I could see the beauty parlor coifed head of Muriel Baxter clacking down the hall with her arms swinging from her shoulders.

Chapter nine

  The group didn't want to settle down. A fiftyish man who hadn't spoken yet was circulating the article about Dawn.  People scanned the newspaper  with a sense of conspiracy.  It took me awhile to understand that they didn't want the chief "Eye of Horus," Anubis, to view it.  One could have been grateful that there was no mention of  Eyes of Horus in the paper. Detective Inez Sharp would eat glass if she caught on to that angle.
  Holly Summerfield seemed mirthful as she slipped the article to Victor Stone.  "Another rich bitch?  'Couldn't tell by me!"  Victor frowned.  He was off on that hair grooming cat behavior again.   I heard the word "lawsuit" whispered.
The biggest change I could detect was that of the demeanor of Abel Meyer. Anubis looked ill and distracted. He showed little readiness to moderate the discussion or take up the reigns and generate a magical activity. The silence was making me embarrassed for him.
 Finally Anubis cleared his throat and asked us to recount our experiences with the hypnosis exercise. The newspaper clipping ceased its circulation once it fell into Alexander's hands.  He shook his head disapprovingly and poked the article into a book.  
Muriel Baxter strode in fifteen minutes late, mumbling a metalic "Sorry" that didn't sound sorry. I was sitting across the circle from her.  Her mouth was taut. Her brow was wrinkled.  Her eyes nested in crows' feet.  I revised my estimate of her age  ten years upward.  Could she be seventy?
"Alexander," Anubis said, "would you start the preparation for the ritual?"
I learned that there was to be a big Egyptian ritual on the last night, the culmination of our work.  Everyone would take the part of an Egyptian deity.  The Eyes of Horus would distribute the masks with the gods' heads and those of us who had brought robes would wear them.  Meanwhile, we must be thinking about which god or goddess we wanted to be, and familiarize ourselves with our role.  Part of a future class would be spent in rehearsal.  Alexander disseminated thick copies of the printed ritual.
I heard Holly mutter "I'm taking Nephthys." I was slow on the uptake. She could have been referring to a blood pressure medication for all I knew.  Then I realized that she was trying to get dibs on a part. I was liking her less with each utterance.  I checked my watch, trying not to look like I was looking.  We still had a half-hour or so before lunch.  I felt like a boxer dodging punches until I could get to my corner for patching up. I'm excellent at remembering what to include when I travel, but it had not occurred to me to pack a library on Egyptian mythology.  
 Anubis interrupted himself by looking at his own watch.  "We are going to work with the Mirror of Hathor."  He glanced at the watch again and looked to be struggling with a decision.  "On second thought, I do not think we will have the time to do so before lunch.  I will allow you the extra half hour.  You can start reading and thinking about the ritual.  I'll see you afterward.  If you have your own mirrors, please bring them."
  I commandeered Ian.  "Alexander Love caught me in his bathroom!"
Ian gave me such a startled look that I couldn't restrain myself from laughing.  I sobered up as I related the snatches of conversation I had heard between Muriel Baxter and Abel Meyer.
  "We were right, Ian. Dawn's secret is some shit that's going to rain down on Anubis. And now Muriel knows and he knows that she knows.  She  confronted him. And she seemed very upset."
Ian grunted by way of acknowledgment.
"Mightn't Muriel be in danger?"  I wondered
"If one buys into the murder theory, she might be."
"She came to my room last night to tell me that Dawn's accident was a murder. She seemed to be looking for some support.  Yet, today I couldn't even get her to make eye contact."
He didn't reply so I added, "I think that Muriel needs to get into her car and drive away from Pilgrim Farm."
"She doesn't have a car.  At least she didn't bring her Porsche.  She rode in from New York with the big man himself, him and Alexander.  She must have caught the Metroliner from Philadelphia  to Manhattan."
Of course it would be the Metroliner, not an ordinary coach.
"Funny that she didn't ride with Dawn, since they both live in Philadelphia."
The thought that Dawn might have a car somewhere in the parking area occurred to me for the first time. That thought was followed by a second.  If Dawn did have a car outside, I had to search it. Would the police have removed it by now, looking for clues? I could check. For that matter, why not check out Dawn's room at Pilgrim Farm as well?
Having dumped on Ian once more, I now wanted to give him the slip. I needed to read that Eyes of Horus magazine, for starters.
   "Where can I get a crash course on the gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt?" 
Ian was able to pull the rabbit out of the hat. "Practical Egyptian Magic" by Murry Hope. "I have a copy with me. Very concise.  I'll bring it to the table at lunch."

I had trouble holding together all the events that had happened in the twenty-four hours that I had been at Pilgrim Farm.  My foolish grandstanding with Peg Woodward had receded to the distant past.
What were the facts?  Dawn had gone for a walk and  had fallen or was pushed off a cliff.  A prickly homicide detective, Inez Sharp, had  made a hasty determination of accidental death..  Muriel Baxter had visited my bedroom.  I had met the improbable Abel "Anubis" Meyer. I had heard Muriel remonstrating with Anubis about some secret.  I had learned about the mystery man, Gabriel.  I had gotten caught in the bathroom with my pants up.
I walked into the small administrative office across the hall from the library. Its furniture was a mixture of early attic and antique.  The ever present Rao looked like a part of the furnishings himself.  He sat behind an outdated computer, entering data. I was thankful that Ian was not here, otherwise we would never get off the topic of hard drives and RAM.  The grandfather clock outside the door bonged out the Westminster chimes.
"What jobs don't you do, Rao? You're the gardener, you're the cook.  Now you're the secretary."  I wondered if he scrubbed the bathrooms too.
The Indian smiled beatifically, but the smile stopped somewhere short of his eyes.  
"I want to check the room numbers of a couple of people.  I need to talk to them."
I was ready to thank God and the whole Egyptian pantheon that he didn't ask who.  There was a printout.  With synchronized movements, he located it and handed it to me.  Nothing like all the jerking around and drawer banging I'd always had to do in the days I had a work station.
I located Muriel Baxter's room number and then looked for Dawn's.  
"What does 'C..L.' mean, Rao?" All I could think of was 'chopped liver.'
 I was not far off base.
"It means 'cosmic liver.'"
 I could accommodate a cosmic mind or even a cosmic heart but to include the liver was carrying things too far.  
"'Cosmic livers' have not requested a room.  They are preferring to camp on the grounds.  They can pitch their tents anywhere past the octagon room.  It is for the nature lovers.  Livers."
"Gotcha."
"The accommodation is also cheaper," Rao added.  "I must now help in the dining room."  He did not seem stressed by time.
I tried to move like him and glide out of the office, thinking that he would approve. 
  Once out of sight, I ran to area where we'd had to leave our cars.  This clearing in the woods was located the equivalent of a couple of city blocks from the main monastery building.  Even so, the parking area was separated by a wall of trees.  No one wanted to look out the windows of the retreat site and have to look at the biggest pollution machine in the history of humanity.
I had no trouble linking the ancient green Toyota with Dawn Vanderbosch.  Hers was the only car packed with camping equipment.  Dawn had never gotten the chance to pitch her tent.
I pulled at the car doors which of course were locked. I needed a rent-a kid. Being familiar with the stolen car rate in Baltimore, I would guess that any boy older than eight could be inside that Toyota before you'd had time to toot a horn.  I didn't want to crack the ignition, I only wanted to get inside.  I had to run all the way back to my room.  I returned with a clothes hanger and set to work.  All the while I wondered why the police had ignored the car.  Maybe they would return for it later--and find my fingerprints all over the place.
 Eventually the hanger worked.  I climbed into the car. I prayed that no one would come by to see me.  The unpacked camping gear of itself was enough to attract attention.
I fiddled with the glove compartment until it flung open. It was crammed with papers, repair bills, and a small black address book.  I pocketed the address book.  I would return it to its proper place later, but first I thought it warranted a look.  
Just as I was ready to split with the goods, a car cut into the lot.  There was no time to look and see whether  friend or foe.  In  fact I doubted that I could count anyone in the former category. I threw myself on the floor in a torturous crouched position.  Unfortunately, the Toyota had an empty space right next to it.  Naturally this was the space the other car pulled into. I waited in vain for the slamming of the car door.  The occupant or occupants were in no hurry to get out. With my luck it would be a couple using the lot as a lovers' lane.  They could be messing around all afternoon. My foot throbbed under the weight of my body and my knee was twisted sideways.  I wondered whether I would ever walk again.  
I heard two voices that I knew.  Holly Summerfield and Victor Stone.  
"Things might get very interesting on the watch tonight,"  I heard Victor say.
"You're one to talk about the watch!  You never take one," Holly snorted.
"You had to say that?  I've told you the reason. And I expect you to keep that reason confidential."
"It's still looks funny, since you're the self appointed sergeant-at-arms for the Eyes of Horus."
Stone sounded worried.  "Should I address the group about my situation?"
"No, no, sorry I brought it up. I hope that hysterical little snit Diana isn't on again tonight"
"She doesn't have sufficient psychic defenses," Stone was saying.  "Her will is weak.  Anything can penetrate."
Then I heard him call out "Isis! Osiris! Horus!"
"I don't think Diana's on.  I'm down for one a.m., Henry Peacock at two, that Baxter woman at three and that new hussy at four a.m.  Jill something or other."
"If Gabriel gets playing his games, it'll be when Peacock's out there or the new girl.  He's not going to try that stuff with you or Muriel."
How would Gabriel know the schedule, I wondered.  Telepathy?
Holly finally remembered that lunch was being served. I thanked God for providing  a hedge witch with  stomach juices. I heard the pair of them disappear down the path.
  Slowly, painfully pulled myself up on the seat of the car. I slipped the small address book in the pocket of my jeans. My muscles were quivering with cramping and with fear.
I sank down under a shade tree a safe enough distance from the parking lot and pulled out the Eyes of Horus magazine.  The articles were what one would expect from such a rag.   The banner article was authored by Anubis.  I wanted to read what the old man had to say, but later.  Other articles featured the significance of the Autumnal Equinox, pyramid power, and the symbolism of the Ankh. I surveyed the list of contributors.  At least half of the magazine was written by Gabriel Spencer.
The inside of the front cover read, "We acknowledge special thanks to Muriel Baxter, editor, without whose generous contribution this organ could not be produced."
Nowhere could I find the name of Alexander Love.
  I made it to the dining room just as Rao was beginning to pull the serving bowls.  I tossed whatever leftovers I could salvage onto my plate .  Ian, Alexander and Henry Peacock were deep in discussion.  It was obvious even to me that Henry was having a hard time keeping up.  I saw that  Ian had saved an empty seat for me next to his own. I felt touched beyond the proportion of the action.
 Ian had also brought the promised book. "Meet me at the coffee pot," I whispered.
I held up the back issue of the magazine.  "Gabriel was a big Kahuna in this group less than a year ago," I said. "Now it looks like Gabriel is out and Alexander has shot out from nowhere.  I need you to get the story, Ian.  You can get Alexander to tell you.  He'll trust you much quicker than he'll trust me."
Ian took the magazine.
"He'll trust you more if we're not seen together so much," I added. "I'll keep my distance."

A walk in the garden was called for.  I needed to chill out before the afternoon session.  There was no better place to do it than under the trunk of a stout tree, surrounded by scents of roses,  marigolds and honeysuckle vines.  I had brought a small notepad with me.  I began copying all the contacts from Dawn's address book that seemed useful.
My craved-for solitude was not to last.  Within two minutes I heard the sound of a creaking hinge.  Muriel Baxter had pushed open the garden gate.
  Muriel lowered herself on a small stone bench as delicately as an egg shell.  Digging into her pocketbook, she pulled out a cellular phone.  I had my belly full of snooping by now but since I was already frozen in my hiding place behind the thick tree, I pricked up my ears like a guard dog.
"Muriel.here."   Her hushed tone told me that she had assigned the call a high degree of privacy. Her whisper tested the range of my hearing.
  "Dawn's dead...they're saying she fell off a cliff.  You and I know very well...."
Since I wanted to know who she was calling, I was hoping that Muriel was one of those people who punctuates dialogue with direct address.  It would be even better if she were a repeater.
"Did Dawn tell me anything about Abel?  You shouldn't need to ask.  You knew she would...no, I don't think so...I confronted Abel so he knows I know... don't you dare to show your face here.  Not a good idea at all...I don't know what to do about it.  A detective came and she was the crudest thing you'd want to meet.  A really grotesque creature...I have an hour of 'watch' tonight, maybe the answer will come to me then...all right, then."
Muriel stuck the phone into her purse and I stepped out from behind the tree.
"You came to my bedroom last night but you haven't met my eyes ever since,"  I said. "Where do we go next?  Where do we go with Dawn?"
Muriel took the pose of a prim headmistress but I could tell that she was dying to know how much I had heard of the call.   "I was informing a mutual friend of the loss of Dawn."
"And you think that she was pushed off that cliff.  What are you and I going to do about that?"
You'd think I had been asking what to do about the global warming crisis.  "Well, I haven't the slightest idea what to do about it."
"If Dawn was killed for something she knows,  then what makes you feel so safe?  If you know too, aren't you in some danger?"
"Why do you presume I feel safe?   Perhaps I don't."
"Can you tell me what this secret is?  The secret you think Dawn died for?"
"I don't think that would be a good idea...." 
 We were no longer alone in the garden.  Alexander Love had just walked through the garden gate. There was no getting away from anybody here, the quietest corner would suddenly transform into Grand Central Station.  Alexander stopped to bury his face in a rose.  I had the rueful remembrance that I had assented to this trip only because I wanted to get away somewhere for some "r and r."
"Time to get back to class, ladies," he said, giving us an unsolicited reward of a broad, benevolent, blue eye-twinkling smile.  
What was he, anyway, some kind of herd dog?
I could have killed when I spied the figure of Rao gliding out of the meditation room.

Chapter ten

  "Please close your eyes, relax completely.  Breathe deeply, and as you inhale, think of the freshness and the scent of the ground after a light rain.  Feel yourself as synonymous with the earth...with regeneration...."
I had no intention of letting myself relax too much but I did pay quiet homage to Anubis' own regenerative powers.  The old man was a charged battery. He circled the room like a dog herding sheep.  Half of the group sat trancelike in their seats.  The rest chose the floor. I could barely sit at all.  I didn't know how I would get through the afternoon.  Yet I didn't dare let Anubis see that I was anything less than one thousand percent engrossed in the activity.  I heard his voice waft close to me and  felt that I could detect a mild electrical field.  I worried whether the group leader really did have magical power--in which case his antenna would be able to tease out my distracted mind.
"The goddess Hathor," he was saying,   "is the daughter of Ra.  What you must never forget about Hathor is that there are two aspects of her powers.  Foremost, she is the loving and ever nourishing cow, never begrudging the gift of her milk.  But she has a second guise, that of the lioness-headed warrior goddess!"  His voice gained strength as he stood in the sanctuary of the old chapel.
 "The Mirror of Hathor is a very vital magical tool.  It is tremendous protection against enemies...."
All I could think of was that I could sure use one of those mirrors. I hoped that Muriel Baxter had her own.
Anubis laid an ornate bronze disk shaped object on a small table.  "You will, each of you, as I call your names, walk quietly to the table and gaze into the Mirror of Hathor.  You will, however, remain in your meditative states.  Once you have experienced the mirror, set it down carefully, thank the goddess, and return to your places to meditate upon your vision."
He began calling the names.  He made each name sound like a mournful caress. I sat with my fingers covering my eyes, but I did plenty of peeping.
One by one, Ian, Victor Stone, Holly Summerfield and Henry Peacock sleepwalked toward the bronzed mirror.  Henry gazed into it like Narcissus adoring his reflection in the water.  Each tiptoed back to his seat like communicants returning from the altar rail. 
"My daughter.  Muriel.  Please approach."
She could have been a graduate walking across the stage. Magna cum laude.  Muriel steadied the mirror in her hands as though it foretold her destiny. She stared into the mirror for some seconds before she turned away.  She looked somber but accepting.  I wondered what secret the mirror had revealed.  I hoped it was not murder.
"Jill.  My child."
I expected everyone's eyes to be boring into me but people were too busy with their own visions.  I found my face in the polished bronze.  The only message I divined was that my bangs needed trimming.
"And Diana -- Diana, named for the goddess of the forest."
Diana, the stricken deer, tiptoed toward the mirror.  She picked it up like it was a partially detonated bomb.
I braced myself for another attention ploy.
Still I was unprepared for the chilling, repeated screams.  The bronze mirror smashed into the floor tiles with a clatter.
  Victor Stone jumped up to recover the mirror.  "Isis! Osiris! Horus!"  You could never tell when Victor was going to invoke his trinity.  
Anubis reacted as though Diana's response was routine, even expected.
"My dearest Diana."  He spoke like a man wondering what was on the six o'clock news.  "Can you tell us what the goddess Hathor has revealed?"
Diana clasped her hands over her face.
  "My face!  My face had melted away!"
Anubis gestured to his lieutenant, Dr. Love.  Once more, Alexander, concerned and attentive,  guided Diana past the convulsive stained glass saints and out of the chapel.
   Two or three others straggled up to the mirror.  But the spell was broken.
Holly Summerfield had her hand in front of her mouth, whispering to Victor.  I heard her say  "Fruitcake.  She should be put out!"
Victor frowned.  He raised his hand tentatively.  "I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but is Diana  suitable for this kind of work?  She could ruin the ritual." 
I wondered how Anubis would field that one.  He remained silent for a full minute,  perhaps fallen into one of his trances. 
 Finally he replied,  "The goddess is trying to get through.  The goddess has chosen Diana as her messenger."
In the distance, I heard the bonging of the grandfather clock.  
  We finished the session by rehearsing for the ritual.  A poor quality tape of the "Triumphal March from 'Aida'" blared from a battered tape player. We practiced entering the chapel in procession.
  I lacked seniority to pull down a role as one of the Egyptian deities.  Instead I was consigned a part as Sentinel in the West..  I didn't complain.
Walking out of the room, I pinned myself to Alexander Love.  "I got a chance to read over the magazine and I have a couple of questions.  Do you have time for a five-minute stroll through the garden?"
He looked at Anubis for his chief's nodding permission. 
But Diana came prancing, slipping her hand through Alexander's arm.  "Ooh, I'm so sorry.  It seems like you're always helping me out of the room."
To his credit, he made it clear that our conversation took priority. I returned Diana's venomous glance with a cockeyed grin. Alexander led me through a door at the side of the building.
  "I'm certain you do have questions."  His voice was as soft as a purring kitten.  
But kittens can pounce.
Of course the only question I had was about Gabriel but I couldn't lead off with that.  Instead I listened for nearly half an hour while Alexander told me more than I'd ever wanted to know about the nature of mystery schools, Egyptian gods and goddesses, the importance of meditation, the meaning of the ankh, the Sacred Tarot, the Holy Qabalah,  and the cup,  rod, sword and  pentacle.  I could tell that he cherished his instructional role.  Perhaps he was being primed to become the chief  "Eye" if Abel Meyer ever had to be pensioned off.
I nodded my feigned interest as he talked. Finally I sucked in a deep breath and tried to sound  nonchalant.  "I notice that this man named Gabriel Spencer was a heavy contributor to the magazine.  So--why isn't he here?"
He fielded the question as smoothly as a shortstop scooping up a routine ground ball. "Gabriel betrayed Anubis."
"Betrayed?"  That was a strong word.  Judas-talk.
"It was personal. Between the two of them.  But it had ramifications for the group. Anubis was unable to continue working with Gabriel."  He spoke as matter of factly as if he were discussing what he expected Rao to throw onto the table for the evening meal.  
"Had Gabriel been with the group very long?"
"Actually, yes.  From its inception."
"Eighteen years?"  I thanked my brain for allowing me to remember that much of what I'd read.
Alexander nodded.  "It was a blow for the old man when they broke up.  There was some concern about a schism in the ranks."
The phrase "broke up" made it sound like a lovers' relationship.  I wondered whether it was.
  "I know that esoteric groups do tend toward these schisms."  Then I shamelessly parroted, "William Butler Yeats stood in the doorway of the Golden Dawn Lodge in London in l900, barring entrance to Aleister Crowley."  I asked whether Gabriel was a man of Anubis' age.  
"Gabriel is in his late thirties, I think. Age is never an issue with the Order.  It's not how many chronological years you have been on the earth in your current incarnation.  It's whether or not you're an 'old soul.'"
"Of course. Couldn't agree more."  So Gabriel would have been about twenty when he met an Anubis who was nearly old enough to get Medicare.
 I  wanted to know much more but I didn't want Alexander to see me as a wag. If I stopped now, the door might stay open for future conversations.
Only trouble was, I wasn't sure if I could keep hanging on my own hinges. I excused myself and again retreated to my room.
  Since the bed was at window level, I felt safer sitting on the floor.  I stuck a pillow behind my back and leaned against the wall.  I had no rubber gloves, didn't think I would have needed them.  Not wanting to rub my fingerprints all over dead Dawn's address book, I turned the pages with the eraser end of a pencil.  
Dawn had entries for Abel Meyer and  Gabriel Spencer. Anubis lived in the upper West Side of Manhattan, on Seventy-second  Street.  I have never known the Big Apple that well, but I guessed his neighborhood to be a comfortable  middle class pocket.  Gabriel showed an address on East Seventh Street in the East Village.  Muriel Baxter sported a ritzy Rittenhouse Square address in Philadelphia.  I found no address for Alexander,  none for Holly Summerfield nor Victor Stone.
 So many of the names in the book were men that it made me wonder about Dawn's profession.  A few entries were full names and addresses, carefully printed. Most were hastily scrawled first names followed by phone digits.
 Some of the listings probably told more than Dawn had ever wanted to share:  Salvation Army Women's Residence. Market Street Shelter for Women. Had Dawn done a stint as a street person? The rich lawyer father must have been a proponent of tough love.  
Under "N" Dawn had written a phone number and the words "Narcotics Anonymous."  
This book belonged in the hands of Detective Inez Sharp, but how to get it to her?  For starters, I could put the book back in the car where I'd gotten it.  I copied all the information I wanted, slipped a few tissues around the small black book and headed down toward the parking lot.  I would just drop the address book on the front seat.
My only problem was that the car was gone.
No end!   An old station wagon with the letters "The Pilgrims" painted on its sides and all the correct cause bumper stickers in the world glued to its bumpers, pulled up.   I read stickers about Mother Earth, about braking for animals, which I do myself; about cigarette smoking and death heads, about adopting a tree.  Rao jumped out of the station wagon, carrying three paper bags.  Our supper, I assumed.
I relieved him of one of the bags.  It felt like twenty pounds of brown rice.
"What happened to Dawn's car?" I asked.  "The dead girl's car.  It was here earlier today."
"Somebody has come for it.  I think it is the police."
The black address book bulged from the pocket of my blue cotton pants. It might as well have been the unabridged dictionary. I wanted to be rid of the book.  My first thought was to drop it right there in the parking lot.  My second thought was to find a post office and mail it to Detective Inez Sharp.  But for the time being, I had no choice but to climb back up to my room and stick it under the mattress of my bed.
  People began hovering around the dining room a good fifteen minutes before the evening meal.  Holly Summerfield and Victor Stone stood whispering just outside the door.  Diana and Alexander were conversing earnestly under the grandfather clock.  A few of the silent meditators stared at the dining room door yearningly, as though the gates of heaven were about to swing open.  The Enneagram people chatted animatedly about people being a "two" or a "five" or an "eight with a nine wing."  Their leader, Peg Woodward, walked past without speaking.  I don't think she even saw me.  Her mind was probably on Dawn Vanderbosch' lawyer father.
I had once done some volunteer work at a nursing home, where most of the residents saw the meals as highlights of the empty and endless days.  The hours of the meals never changed.  Lunch hit the table at eleven and supper at four-thirty.  It wasn't unusual for people to start rolling their wheelchairs into the dining room an hour beforehand.  I recognized a variant of this institutional behavior at Pilgrim Farm.
Alexander Love again piled up a tray and carried it to Abel Meyer's room. If not for Alexander, poor Anubis would have starved to death!  Not wanting to look like I was hanging onto Ian's shirt tails, I plopped down next to Henry Peacock.  He was well named.  His wardrobe tended toward the garish and multicolored.  He also had a tendency to strut.
"Have you done a night watch yet?" he asked.  Before I could answer, he began to pontificate. It was important to go on watch wearing a hooded magical robe, he insisted.  
"Absolutely," added an earnest faced young woman, by way of punctuation.  Her name was Sandra.  Apparently, she did not utter independent sentences.  She merely interjected agreements.  She would never have disagreed with anyone in a hundred lifetimes.
"The only robe I've brought is my bathrobe.  I don't particularly want to roam around the grounds in that," I said.
Holly Summerfield looked disgusted, as though I'd traveled to Pilgrim Farm without regular clothes at all.  "You're new at this?" she asked.
"I was a last minute switch from the Enneagram workshop."
"You won't be able to borrow anyone else's robe."  Henry sounded as stern as my local librarian the last time I'd lost a book.  "Robes are too personal.  Your energy vibration clings to your robe."
Alexander Love had reappeared.  He slid into the conversation as though he had never left the table.  "The teaching makes it clear," he said, flashing his aquamarine ring as he passed the margarine, "that you do not need the outer accouterments for magical work.  You don't need a particular form of dress.  You don't need candles, incense, chanting,  chalices, cauldrons.   You don't need any of it. You can do all of the work in your head by just building up the images. Of course, there are people who require all the trappings.  They lack imagination."
Henry looked humbled.  He tried the defense mechanism of projection, turning his attention to Victor Stone.
"Victor!  I didn't see your name on the list to do a watch."
Victor Stone's expression turned to granite. I thought of the conversation between him and Holly while I had lain crunched on the floor of Dawn's Toyota.  
"I'm unable to take a night watch," Victor said tautly. "I'm taking medication.  The medication is very sedating.  Once I take it, I can't arouse myself in the night."  His voice got  huffy.  "I'm only explaining this lest anyone should think I'm shirking my duties,  Henry.  Because it's not your business."
"I hope you can arouse yourself if you gotta pee," Holly said.
I wanted to ask about the medication but I'm not completely without a sense of decorum.  
Alexander didn't have the same scruples. "Blood pressure?  Heart?  Forgive my intrusion, but this is my profession.  Perhaps you need to be looking at homeopathy."
Henry Peacock, his feathers ruffled, pushed his chair back and carried his tray to the disposal window.  
Diana took his vacated seat.  "Oh, I thought I'd never find you," she said to Alexander, putting her hand to her ear as though she had been hunting for a misplaced earring.  "I was  in back of you in the food line and then you  disappeared."
I noticed that people had a way of disappearing and reappearing around Pilgrim Farm. 
"Is Anubis coming to the table?" Ian asked.
"I carried his supper to his room.  He needs to conserve his energy," Alexander said.
I searched around for my own energy reserve but all I came up with was an empty tank.  Someone had turned on my tap and let me drain.   I needed to get to my room before I collapsed, but I didn't want to make a production about leaving.
Once Ian had told me that people can make themselves invisible, so that they can pass down a city sidewalk without being seen.  I argued that this was impossible unless the whole street was occupied by the unsighted.  Yet there are times when people don't see you.  I guess it all depends on how you walk and how you dress and whether you're careful not to project an attitude.  It also helps if you look like you know where you're going and you don't show or even feel emotion.  I tried emptying myself of emotional content as I slipped slowly out of the dining room.  I avoided eye contact.  Whether or not anyone noticed my exit, I can't truly say. But I know that I felt relieved to fall across my narrow bed.  
  I was too tired to sleep and anyhow it was still daylight, no later than seven p.m. I lay there barely conscious but my body would not take that extra step of dispatching my brain into sleep.  I wondered if dying ever felt like this, an inability to maintain consciousness.  Eventually I drifted off into a state where I fell captive not to true dreams but to a series of unpleasant images, quasi-wakefulness, and then the drifting again.  I mulled over the hypothesis that the night watch would protect the group against what they called a psychic attack.  Was someone trying to attack me now, to break into my consciousness and post disturbing images there?  
I have always hated being in an unlighted room and having shadows creep up. Even worse is taking a nap while there's still daylight, only to wake up in a pitch dark room. Before this year I had never been much of a nap taker.  But in those months when I sat home waiting in vain for the Social Services director to clear my reputation and call me back to work, I was introduced to the kind of fatigue that can only come from depression and relentless insomnia..  I napped in those days.
 I finally dragged my weary body from the hot, sticky bed.  I had to go to the bathroom.  I staggered through the door with the same weariness that one feels when nature calls at 3 a.m. You have to arouse yourself enough to get up but your body bucks you every step of the way.
  I remembered the coffee which brewed all day long in the dining room.  Perhaps a few drops would still be there.  I made my way downstairs.  Outside, it was not quite dark. I walked into the deserted dining room.  The Mr. Coffees were spotless and empty.
For a place that housed close to sixty people, the building was eerily silent.  Maybe this was meditation hour and I'd missed it.  I thought I might check out Ian. Then I heard the voices.  
Muriel Baxter stood just outside the back kitchen door, near the garbage bin. She was engaged in a heated exchange with a tall,fair haired man in an old blue pickup truck.
I heard her say, "I warned you not to drive up here!"  Although upset, she still exuded her cool control.  I couldn't hear everything the man was saying. It was something about "no harm" or "make sure you're not harmed."
"What if you're seen?  What if Anubis...."
The man in the pickup seemed to be setting out a case for Muriel to leave with him.  Her refusal was adamant.  
"And no more tricks.  There's enough going on here as it is, with Dawn and everything...."
"What can I say to make you get in the truck and leave?" the man was asking in a low voice.
The discussion went on for another five minutes.  Finally the blue  truck groaned and grumbled as it was slammed first into reverse, then into first gear.  It backfired once or twice as it disappeared around the back of the building.  As it receded, I was able to read the bumper sticker "Magicians have crystal balls."

Chapter eleven

 Around ten o'clock I wandered out into the thick night air to catch a glimpse of the silver-golden glow of the full moon.  No matter how many times I see the full moon, I always feel a primal sense of awe, like I had never seen a full moon before.  The full moon is most striking when it is orange and bloated and low in the sky upon rising.  Tonight, though, it was later and the moon was already halfway to its zenith.
 I heard a rustle in the bushes.  Two little kitten-cats jumped out and chased each other across the clearing.  One had orange markings.  The other was a stripped brown tabby which reminded me of the tabbies that had lived in a nearby alley during my childhood.  You don't see so many of the tabbies anymore.  People seem to favor the solid black or white colors, or else the  multicolored and almost always female calicoes and tortoises.  The sight of the kittens dancing in the moonlight restored my energies.
I could hear a faint strain of the "Triumphal March from Aida."  Some of the group, those who had starring roles, must have been practicing the ritual.  Ian had told me that you don't want too much practice for magical rituals or else the practice would turn into the ritual itself.  Power would build up, and then all kinds of entities might be unleashed.
 Two figures were ambling across the lawn.  Before I could see their faces, I recognized the tall, pudgy figure of Ian and the more slender  form of Alexander.
"Are you going to be all right for the watch tonight, Jill?" Alexander asked.
"What do you mean,  'all right?'"  I remembered my grandmother telling me that you never answer a question by asking another.  I don't know why I thought of my grandmother just then.
"Alexander thinks that we might be in for a psychic attack tonight.  More of Gabriel's doings. In fact, Holly Summerfield even said that she thought she saw Gabriel here tonight."
"She saw a thought form," Alexander said. "Believe me, Gabriel is not at Pilgrim Farm.  Most likely he's in the East Village. But he might be working on a special type of meditation where you try to project your physical image to another place."  Alexander closed his eyes, cupped his hands over his face and started a rhythmic swaying.
"Are you all right..." I started to ask but Ian  grabbed my arm and hushed me.  
Several moments passed in silence before Alexander emerged from his trance.  "I can...see him...sitting on the floor of his temple.  He is doing an astral projection...damn,  I've lost the vision."
I could quicker believe the version of Holly the hedge witch.  I wondered whether Alexander was doing the second-sight thing to impress Ian.
"If you get into trouble,  remember to do the banishing pentagram," Ian advised.
I promised that I would and said goodnight.
  Lying on that narrow, lumpy mattress made me feel like I was lying in my tomb, although I had announced my intention of being cremated.   The final insult was that the mattress was slippery.  It was encased in a cheap plastic.  I wondered if  the Pilgrims expected that their sojourners would be bedwetters.  The under sheet was not even fitted. One good myoclonic jerk and the sheet was wrapped around your middle like a snake.
  The light went out in Anubis' room around midnight although for all I knew he could have been sitting in the dark and invoking the whole Egyptian pantheon.  I must have slept an hour although it didn't feel like it.  I squeezed the light button on my Casio and saw that it was nearing one a.m.  I sat up and peered out the window just in time to see the hooded figure of Holly Summerfield traverse the path leading to the meditation room.  Sensor lights illuminated part of the walkway, the lighting triggered by the passing form.  The foot bridge over the lily pond must have been off limits for the sensors because suddenly the walker had only  the moonlight to guide her. 
I lay down on my side and wondered which Egyptian deity you evoked to beg a little sleep. My body rebelled at settling down.  I remember thinking that this was the worst night I'd put in since all that garbage from my job had come raining down.
 Little did I know that this would prove to be  arguably the case.
I lay semi-awake until close to three.  By that time I was  afraid to sleep.  The Casio was set for quarter to four. I had my jeans and a black tee shirt draped over the chair.  I could dress in thirty seconds.  I worried about the alarm not going off.
The next thing I knew, the Casio was bleeping its little heart out.  I awakened with my heart pounding.  In the dream, I had been standing at the edge of a cliff and had begun to lose my balance.
  Now I was the one walking through the sensor lights down the path toward the meditation room. The full moon had already inched toward the west as it followed its trajectory across the sky.  I wondered whether there was a protocol for the changing of the guard. Muriel would be watching and waiting.  I surmised that the transfer should be made with a dignified silence.
I knocked gently on the door of the meditation room.  I could see the flicker of the lighted candle inside.  Muriel did not immediately approach the door.  Perhaps she was deep in prayer, meditation or even sleep. It wasn't quite four a.m.  I waited a couple of minutes and pulled the door gently. 
Inside, the candle flickered.  There was just light enough to see the prostrate hooded, robed figure. Just light enough to see the ax protruding from the back of Muriel's head and to see the thick dark red fluid splayed to every corner of the tiny room.
I did not enter the room but closed the door as silently as I had opened it. My gasp never quite turned into a scream.  I clasped a hand over my mouth and purposely hyperventilated to keep from retching.  
I knew from my reading murder mysteries that I should have cried out hysterically.  I should have run through the dorms bawling at the top of my lungs, "Murder!  Bloody murder!"  I should have grabbed at a phone, dialed "911."  Perhaps Muriel had even carried her cellular phone with her to the meditation room. Not that I was going to mess around in there to find out. So many things, I should have done. But all I could do was sink to the ground and stare up at that full moon.  Find Anubis?  He might drop dead himself from the shock--provided he didn't have anything to do with this.  The second death confirmed my suspicion that the first had been no accident.  Someone at Pilgrim Farm was a murderer and I had no idea whom I could or couldn't trust.
What I finally did was probably one of the dumbest stunts I have ever pulled in my life.  Even today, I can't explain why I did it.  I knew that I had nearly an hour before the five o'clock "relief shift" would appear.  I didn't have the luxury of waiting an hour before sounding the hue and cry.  But I could probably get away with ten or fifteen minutes.  I wanted a crack at Muriel's dorm room before the rush hour traffic arrived.  I wanted to look through Muriel's possessions and see if I could find any kind of clue at all that would suggest why an ax was now lodged in her skull.
I knew where the room was by now.  I approached it on tiptoe with great stealth; it would not do for anyone to see me near the bedrooms.
 Muriel had left her door unlocked with her lamp on.  She had done so in readiness for her four a.m. return.  An overwhelming feeling of sadness, edged with irony, hit me like I had been punched in the stomach.  All Muriel had wanted was to return to her room for two or three hours of sleep. She would never return to the room again, but she would sleep forever.  I leapt into the room, quickly closing the door behind me.
This time I did scream.  A woman was sitting on the edge of the bed.  It was Muriel.  She looked unwell but that did not prevent her from asking me caustically what I was doing walking into her bedroom at four a.m.
All I could do was exclaim "You're not the one.  It wasn't you.  It was someone else!"
"Miss Thomas, I must ask you to speak sense or to leave.  I've been deathly ill all night.  Migraine."
I had no choice but to sink down on the edge of her bed.  It was either that or drop as my shaking knees gave way.
"I had the watch at four o'clock..."  I was speaking breathlessly, not recognizing my own voice.
"Why, then you'd best see to your duty immediately.  You mean no one's over there now?"
"When I got there...the previous watcher......was lying in a pool of blood with an ax sticking in the skull."  I was fighting hysteria.  "Blood everywhere.  I didn't go in.  I'm sure they're dead.  I'd assumed it was you." 
 For the first time, I wondered if the victim might still be alive, might still be clinging to life.  I didn't see how this could be, but I felt irresponsible for not summoning immediate help.
Muriel Baxter's face, pale when I first entered, was now a chalky white.   "Dear God!  I've let that child die for me!"  Muriel hunched over, rocking rhythmically, clutching her forehead.  "She swapped nights with me!  I'd felt the migraine coming on since supper.   I'm afraid I let it get a grip on me.  I didn't medicate soon enough and I felt deathly ill.  I managed to find Diana and she agreed to take the watch for me.  She's taken my death!  I presume you came to my room to verify that I was the victim?"
That was the ticklish part.  I didn't want to tell her that I had come to search for clues about her murderer.
"We've got to get help,"  I gasped.  "I'll go wake Ian."
"Alexander must be told at once," Muriel ordered.  "Get him first. Can you summons help?  I can't keep my eyes open without getting hit with these waves of vertigo and nausea.  I've got to lie back down....wake up Alexander first."
"Right."  Adrenalin had kicked in.  I felt I had to run.  "Keep your door locked. Please!  Better yet, can you change your room?  You can go to my room. But are you sure that the murderer specifically was after you?  Perhaps he just wanted to kill someone.  Perhaps it didn't matter who."
"I wish I could say I had doubts," Muriel said.  "I'll lock my door."
 I found a phone and dialed 911. I knew that the call would be clocked in at four eighteen and wondered how I was going to explain the time lag between the discovery of the body and the call.  I remembered that Muriel had her own phone.  Why hadn't we phoned from her room?
Discarding Muriel's instructions to report to Alexander Love,  I went to Ian's door first.  I needed to talk with someone I'd know all my life more than someone I had known for two days. Especially when there had been two bodies in two days.
I pleaded that I might find Ian still awake, hacking away on his laptop .That wasn't the case.  The trouble was that Ian, although he slept short, did sleep like a dead man..  I knew this lore about him from sleeping stories his exasperated mother would tell my mother during my childhood. Once Ian was out, you practically had to douse him with water to arouse him.  I stood outside his door in the dimly lit hallway banging and banging.  People were calling out.
A door opened across the hall and Henry Peacock stuck his head out.  "He's not there.  If he was there he would have answered the door!"
I was getting frantic.  I listened for sirens.  The emergency wagons would be blasting through the night at any minute.  I also felt an urgent need to return to the proximity of the meditation room.  Some instinct told me that a freshly killed body, once discovered,  should not be left unattended.
"Ian!   It's Jill!  For God's sake open the door!"
Maybe he wasn't there after all.  Maybe he had done the killing.  Maybe he was dead too!  Thoughts were flashing through my brain, none taking root, each giving way to another.  Perhaps I should have aroused Rao.  He at least had some administrative responsibility for the place.  
A balding man in a bathrobe was giving me a silent, myopic glare from his bedroom door.  Since he was not in Anubis' group or Peg Woodward's, he could only be one of the silent meditators.  
By the time Ian got to his door, all chances of having a quick private counseling session were dashed.  The hallway was aroused.  I addressed Ian as well as the gawkers.  "Someone's been attacked in the meditation room.  I'm almost certain the person's dead."
"Don't you know?" someone called.
"It must be Muriel!"  
"No it wasn't," Henry Peacock pronounced.  "It must have been Diana!  I left the watch at three and she was the one who came in to relieve me. Wow!"
I don't half remember the cacophony of responses that broke out.  Some people ran to the meditation room, others ran for Alexander, others just stood their ground, asking incredulous questions.  Ian pulled me into his room and made me sit down. I had an experience of floating up to the ceiling and looking down at myself sitting on the side of his bed as he unselfconsciously kicked his pajamas off and pulled on a shirt and chinos.  I did not try to fight my altered perspective.  I watched Alexander Love, who had also shed his night wear, charge into the room and start a cross-examination.
"Best let her alone.  She's in a state of shock.  Why don't you check out the meditation room?  I'll look after Jill."
"No," I heard myself saying.  "We'll all go to the meditation room. The police will be here.  They'll be lined up to talk to me.  I'm going to be very, very popular."

Chapter twelve

 Many times I have had the experience of driving through the darkness down Route 95 or some other interstate.  I am attentive, yet in harmony with the flow of the traffic.  Suddenly I come upon the disjunction of an accident.  The traffic first slows, then halts. Red and white lights from ambulances, fire engines and police cars turn into flares in the night sky. Overturned cars block the roadway and body bags line the shoulder.  In cases where there is still hope, the loud slapping sound of the Medivac helicopter might be heard.
The flashing lights and police activity now flooded Pilgrim Farm.  Diana Jones was a goner. One doubted that Diana's eyes had ever looked into the face of her killer. There was even more doubt that her killer had eyeballed her. He--if it was a he--never looked beyond the hooded robe.  If I had taken Muriel's shift instead of Diana, I might have been spared because no one would have mistaken me for Muriel.  I had no robe. And I shared no secret.
An anguished Rao was standing apart from the others, wringing his hands.  Alexander Love pushed to the forefront, dragging a somnolent Victor Stone.
  "Is it absolutely essential that we get into this mistaken identity story?" I heard Victor ask.  "No one knows for a fact that the killer was after Muriel.  Maybe the killer didn't care who he killed.  Why get the police focused on the Eyes of Horus?
I could not hear the totality of Alexander's whispered reply.  I did catch the phrases "...absolutely scrupulous with the police..." and  "...Muriel in danger...."
The night lasted forever even as the grayish dawn sky paled into an ominous daylight.  The police activity was endless.  The area was now sealed by yellow police tape.  It looked like the whole of Pilgrim Farm had been declared a crime scene.  
The police finally chased us away from the immediate space around the meditation room.  We were told to go back to the residence hall and remain in our rooms.   We would all be questioned. We were not to talk to each other until this questioning had occurred.   And no one was to even think of leaving the farm.  Uniformed officers would be patrolling the building to enforce this order.
In the confusion of sixty people being horded back to their rooms, I was able to grab Ian and get him to disobey.  I couldn't stand the thought of waiting in my room, now my prison, without borrowing Ian's brain to bounce a few ideas off of. He was so good at helping me sieve through my worries.  My first worry was what kind of arrangements would be made for breakfast.
"You should have phoned 911 immediately!"  Ian fussed.  "Whatever possessed you--to do anything else?"
"Do you expect an answer or is this a rehearsal for when Inez Sharp gets to me?"  
The fact is, I was so frightened that my knees were shaking again.  I couldn't control them.   The muscles in my stomach felt crushed into a tight bundle.  It wasn't a pain, it wasn't feeling sick.  It was merely one of the worst feelings that I've ever experienced.  It was the exact somatic reaction that I had when the police had come to take me into custody following the accusations of the  foster child.  I felt that I was reliving part of that trauma.
And I knew that, because I had found the body, I would face the full inquisition.
"I went to Muriel's room to see if I could find anything in there that would explain her being killed."
"It might be better to say that you ran to her because you were hysterical. Hey, wait a minute.  The police don't know...that you knew..who would be in that meditation room before your turn.  You wouldn't have needed to know that at all.  You walk in, you discover a horrible scene, you get hysterical and run to a friend's room.  A friend that you knew had her own telephone, which you could use to make the call."
"No.  I'm sure the police will make a lot out of who was supposed to be in that meditation room and when.  And there's a list posted in the classroom giving the schedule.  But Muriel got incapacitated by a migraine headache."
"Which beats being decapitated!"
I acknowledged that it did.  "The whole point of the thing is that Muriel was the intended victim.  She knew it."
"Maybe that's why she traded places with Diana."
"Oh no.  She'd never!  I don't mean that Muriel knew that someone was going to get a hatchet lodged in their skull during the vigil.  I mean that she knew in retrospect!  She was horrified that she'd sent Diana to her death.  Dawn knew something and she was killed for it.  Dawn had passed on information to Muriel and someone tried to kill her for that information.  What could this information be and who would be so threatened by it that they could kill to keep it from getting out?  Who's the power player here?  Anubis!"
"I doubt if Anubis  has the strength to push a girl off a cliff."
"It doesn't take strength," I protested.  "Stand in front of me a minute."
He did and I got in back of him and was easily able to push him from one end of the room to the next. His involuntary forward motion was stopped by the wall.  He turned around, surprised that I had been able to budge his weightier girth.
"Anubis has the strength for both murders," I said.  "He is always talking about the importance of will.  If you really focus your will to do something, wouldn't that single-minded focus give you the strength to do it?"
  "Within limits, yes," Ian said.  "I believe that."
"There's another possibility,"  I said.  "This Gabriel-- who for whatever reason was banished from the group.  Ian, I'm almost positive that he was here at Pilgrim Farm last night."  
"How could that be?  If anyone from the Eyes of Horus had recognized him, he'd have been kicked out the front door."
"And immediately sneak around to the back door," I said.  "I heard Muriel speaking on the phone to someone today and she made reference to a big secret. The other person sounded like he wanted to come here right away but Muriel was dead set against it."  I shuddered at the word "dead."
"Then, after supper, a guy in a blue pickup drove right up to the door in back of the dining room. And our lady Muriel was waiting right there to talk with him.  She was getting hot, in her cool way. She was fussing about the guy being seen.  He was trying to press Muriel to leave with him but she wasn't having any part of that."
"You overheard all of these conversations?  You need to open a private eye business when you get home."
"If I ever get home," I said.  "I'll give you one guess who I think the man in the blue pickup is.  Gabriel."
"Could very well be.  What's your description, Inspector?"  Ian asked.
"Blondish-red hair.  He must've been tall, you could tell by how high up he was in the seat of the truck."
"Maybe I can ask around what Gabriel looks like."
"There was another reason I thought he might be Gabriel."  I told Ian the words on the bumper sticker.  
He roared with laughter.  I shushed him in alarm but his laugh had loosed the knot in my stomach slightly.
"Gabriel lives in New York City," I said.  "I'm making the assumption that he was at Pilgrim Farm last night.  It would be the easiest thing in the world for him to drive away, hang around, maybe hide the truck in the woods and sneak back up here in the middle of the night to kill. But clearly Muriel's his buddy.  He wouldn't have wanted to kill Muriel.  Maybe he warns Muriel to fake a headache, tells her to get someone else to go on her 3 a.m. watch.  Then he sneaks back up here, kills a person that he knows isn't Muriel, being fully aware that everyone else will think the targeted person was Muriel."
Ian rubbed his forehead as though he were rubbing the idea into his brain.
 A uniformed policeman, a man in his early forties whose eyes, nose and mouth looked like they belonged on someone else's face, banged on the door.  He was swearing loudly.  Wasn't this the room of Jill Thomas and only Jill Thomas?  Who the hell was this other s.o.b. and why wasn't he in his own room? Didn't we hear the orders that no one was to fraternize before being interviewed!
We both apologized.  I tried for an innocent smile..  
"You come with me, Miss Thomas.  The detectives are ready for you."

Chapter thirteen

  The library, with its imposing bookcases, well-used chairs, and late Nineteenth Century aura, had been commandeered by the the police as an interrogation room.  A similar fate befell the room across the hall which Rao had used as his office.  A pair of uniformed officers, one male and one female, had set up posts just outside these rooms, dictating whether one went to the left or the right.  
  Detective Inez Sharp had brought a fellow detective with her today, a tall, hunched over man in his mid-fifties.  I gathered that his name was Makepeace.  His face looked like he had been hit with a sudden cramp.  Sharp and Makepeace seemed to be of equal ranking  although Inez Sharp was making it clear by her every word and gesture who she considered to be in charge.
"Who gets Jill Thomas?" called out the female officer.  I never did like being referred to in the third person.  It made me feel like a Federal Express package.  I admit I felt strong concern about where I was destined to be delivered.  I would have chosen Makepeace if only on the basis of his name.  That would have been a great surname for an antiwar activist during Nam.  
"Thomas is mine."  Inez Sharp's voice was so deep that it barely passed for a woman's.  She gave a rough gesture in the direction of a specific chair at the round table in the library, removing my possibility of choice.  With deliberately slow motions, she took a seat directly opposite and pressed a button on a recorder. She said a few introductory words into the machine. A glare reflected off her glasses so that it was hard to see her eyes.  
"So you're the one that wanted to make it a murder.  You're the one that heard the girl falling off the cliff.  And you're the one that stumbled into this murder at four in the morning.  Do you make a career of being at murder scenes?"
There was no way to answer the question.  I said "No, I don't" and waited while Sharp ran through her repertoire of sarcastic comments. 
"What were you doing up and outside at four in the morning?"
I tried to present the concept of the night watch in the most sanitized manner I knew how.  "Each of us spends an hour in prayer and meditation while the others are asleep.  Four o'clock was my hour."
My answer drew the expected contemptuous guffaw.  Then she had me describe the discovery of the body.  She listened with her round head, which reminded me of a volleyball, cocked at a forty-five degree angle.
 "Let's run through that again, girly,"  she said.
"The whole thing?  But you have it recorded...."
A smug lip puckering smile creased her lower face.  "That's right. Let's go over that again."
Rao and his helpers must have gotten some kind of breakfast off the ground.  I was tortured by the smell of coffee.
"I'll go over it as often as it takes for you to get it, but I really do need a cup of coffee."  I told myself, be strong.  Never grovel.  Make demands.
Inez Sharp called one of the officers in.  "Get us some coffee in here."
I repeated my story, trying to make it a duplicate of my first rendition.
The door opened and in its brief cracking I glimpsed an ill looking Anubis being ushered into a room down the hall.  The police seemed to have assembled a large team of interrogators.  Alexander Love leaned forward on  a straight chair near the grandfather clock, waiting for his turn to be grilled.  It was like my schoolgirl days of waiting to go into the Catholic confession booth.  The only difference was that then, I had been eager to fill the priest's ears with my pitiful little sins of disobeying my mother and being sassy to my grandmother.  Now, it was this detective that seemed to expect some big confession even though I was free of wrongdoing.  
Having twice told my tale, I waited to see which direction Inez Sharp would run.  She chose to run in circles.
"What is your home address?"
I told her.
"Oh, you live in Baltimore.  What work do you do there?"
"Between jobs."
"What are you doing in a place like this?"  The inference was that it was some kind of a brothel.
I explained that I had come with a friend; that I'd viewed it as a vacation.  And that coming had been a big mistake.
"Tell me more about this night watch.  What are you supposed to be watching?
"Watching over the people while they sleep."
 Inez didn't understand it and didn't like it.   "Are you some kind of a witch? A devil worshipper?"
I made a decision then and there that I wasn't going to sit here and be baited.  "Neither one."  I was sure she couldn't tell the difference.  "At this point, I have to request...."
"A lawyer!"  she smirked.
"Not a lawyer, no.  My request is that one of the other detectives join us for my interview.  Maybe Mr. Makepeace. There are some things that I need to let the police know about.  Things that might help the police get to the bottom of these murders.  But I don't feel comfortable talking just with you.  I don't trust you enough to do that."
  I was horrified once the words had come out but there was no way I could continue with the status quo.
"Oh?  You feel more comfortable talking with the man?  What is this, sexism?"
I assured Inez Sharp that my feelings had nothing to do with sexism or sex.  She got up and left the room, grumbling under her breath.  I was left alone  for a good twenty minutes.  
I heard the chimes from the grandfather clock but forgot to count the hour.
Finally the hunched over man with the cramp came into the room along with Inez Sharp.
"Just don't think we're here to play good cop-bad cop, girly,"  Sharp said.
"I don't think any of us is here to play at all!"  I can get just as surly as the next person.  Sharp needed to know that.
"I understand you desire to make a statement?" asked Detective Makepeace.
"Isn't it the other way around?  I was called here to give a statement.  Naturally I desire to tell the police what I know.  I realize that I'm a key player because I was the one that walked in on the body.  That was when I was reporting for the watch.  I had explained the watch to Detective Sharp but I'll go over it again for you."
"That won't be necessary," Makepeace said, wincing like the current cramp was the worst one yet..  I wanted to offer him an a few aspirins.
"I've just had a talk with Dr. Abel Meyer.  He explained the concept of the vigil quite adequately.  I understand what the Eyes of Horus were trying to do."
Inez Sharp emoted,  "I wish I did!  I-wish-I-did!"
"Detective Makepeace.  Detective Sharp.  I've been at Pilgrim Farm two days. I have no idea who killed these two women.  It could be that some serial killer is hanging around in the woods. But there is a possibility that it's an inside job.  And it could be related to the group I'm in.  That's the group led by Abel Meyer.  Who's also known as Anubis."  
I have always hated traitors. I don't guess anyone likes them much.  I wasn't really convinced that someone in the group was the culprit. I didn't have my ducks lined up enough to be able to say that. But I couldn't deny that there were strange goings on with Eyes of Horus.
"Dawn knew some secret and she's dead.  Dawn  told Muriel Baxter the secret. The two women knew each other.   They live in Philadelphia.  In Dawn's case, 'lived.' I think that Muriel was the intended victim in the meditation room. She was scheduled to be there.  But she came down with a migraine and got Diana to take her place.  Since most of the watchers wore robes with hoods, the killer might have attacked Diana, thinking it was Muriel.  The schedule of the watch was posted in advance, so the killer would have looked for Muriel Baxter to be in that  room between three and four a.m.  Unless it was un unknown killer--someone hanging around in the woods who saw someone walk into the meditation room and didn't care who it was."
Makepeace didn't seem interested in my serial killer hypothesis.  "What was this secret that Dawn had told the other woman?"
"That's what I don't know. I admit that I eavesdropped on a conversation between Muriel and Abel Meyer.  I was only able to grab a few snatches of conversation.  The idea was that someone had told Dawn this secret, knowing that she would carry it right to Muriel. . I don't know the secret and under the circumstances I'm glad I don't. Whatever the secret is, I think it's  something that would harm Anubis' group. I think the intention in telling the secret to Dawn, knowing that she would tell Muriel, was to destroy the group.  
"I do have Dawn's address book. I found it in her car.  I fully admit to snooping.  I was trying to get to the bottom of the crime myself--the first one, and I borrowed the book from the car.  When I tried to return it, the car had been towed away.  I need to give this book to you. I'm sorry.  My information might not amount to much.  But I couldn't just keep it to myself. Maybe I'm way off base."
Makepeace winced.  "Uh, yes, the address book might be helpful.  How well did you say you knew Dawn?"
I felt like I was skipping rope, with Makepeace and Sharp doing the turning.  "I didn't know her at all.  She sat next to me for an hour in class the first day--until Ms. Woodward sent us outside to work."
Another wince.  "With a very unfortunate result for Dawn.  Will you describe your involvement at the scene of her death?"
"I was walking with my friend Ian Henry.  We heard her cry out."
I described in as much detail as I could the ensuing chaos.  I recounted my collision with Alexander Love. The sudden materialization of at least half the camp. Rao's running down the path. Dr. Love sliding down the river bank.  His call for healers.  The healers jumping into the water like leap frogs.  Muriel's proclamation that Dawn was beyond help."
"How are you connected with Ian Henry?"
I explained that Ian was a  relative and  friend, the person who steered me toward Pilgrim Farm, and the only conference attendee on whom I had ever laid eyes before two days ago. 
"You're a follower of this fellow that calls himself Anubis, though," Inez Sharp threw in.
By now I was feeling silly about my querulous separation from Peg Woodward and I was certainly wishing to God I had never crossed paths with Abel Meyer and his band of night watching meditators.  Embarrassed, I explained how I had come to leave the Enneagram Workshop and wind up in Anubis'  class.
Finally I threw in the business of Muriel Baxter's coming to my bedroom to dump her feelings on me. I didn't want to drag in Muriel any more than she was already dragged in.  But I didn't want to ignore her either because I was convinced that, if the murderer struck again and it did turn out to be an inside job, Muriel would be the person in the body bag.
I was through with the detectives but they were by no means through with me. "I think this one needs to go to headquarters,"  Inez Sharp said.  "This one has all too many ideas."
The threat of being removed from Pilgrim Farm frightened me.  I did want to leave but not that way.  I wondered if I would be the only one going to headquarters.
In the end, I didn't go anywhere.  It was past lunch time when the detectives suddenly seemed to lose interest in me. I still had to stay sequestered at Pilgrim Farm. But I was free to talk to anyone who had already been interviewed.
Inez Sharp gave a departing jab. "Just remember that nothing that you told us leaves this room. We don't want you running your mouth."
I didn't promise. 
 I straggled out of the library to an awaiting reception committee:  Ian,  Alexander Love,  Mavis Summerfield. Anubis wanted to see me right away.


Chapter fourteen

  "We thought they'd never get through with you!" Ian exclaimed.  "They dusted off the rest of us hours ago. 
  Ian sure knew how to make a person feel good.  I had no idea how late it had gotten.  When a pair of homicide detectives start messing with your every word, even the clock in your stomach stops running.  
  "Thought you might be hungry."  Ian thrust a soggy paper bag in my hand.  It contained a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and cold coffee.  I was as thankful as if it were fillet mignon and champagne.
  "What did Rao serve for lunch?" I asked.
  Ian, Alexander and Holly glanced at each other.  "Rao didn't make an appearance for lunch," Ian said.  "The police packed him away.  It was his ax.  He admitted that much.  Hard not to.  His fingerprints were all over it."
  Rao was the last person on the farm I would have cast as an ax murderer.  "Of course it's his ax!  He takes care of the grounds.  The ax was sitting there waiting for whoever wanted to use it."  I cringed as I thought about the use.
  "They took Victor away too."  Holly made it sound like it was my fault.
  "Why Victor?"  Why Victor and not me?
  Even in a crisis, Alexander maintained that low, confiding tone of voice that made you believe he was ready to impart the most intimate secret of his life.  "Victor had never signed up for a night watch.  That apparently made the police very suspicious."
  We had reached Anubis' door.  Alexander opened the door without knocking.  I saw that Anubis had lost his aura of guru..  He looked like a sick old man.
  Abel Meyer aka Anubis took my hand. "I must ask of you, dear Jill, to grant us a synopsis of what you have told the police." 
  I again found myself puzzling over his precise, clipped but accentless English.  But my more immediate conundrum was how I wanted to answer his question.  Or why he was asking it.
  My eyes met Ian's.   He looked sympathetic but curious.  I remembered Inez Sharp's injunction to keep my lips buttoned.
  "You were all interviewed?"  I asked.
  "Everyone had that pleasure," Holly Summerfield said flatly.
  "You were ordered not to disclose?"
  "We were," Alexander said gently.  "But those of us in the Eyes of Horus are  fraters and sorors.  Certainly there can be no secrets among brothers and sisters."
  I didn't want to remind him that I was not a member of the Eyes.  I was beginning to develop a healthy fear of the Eyes.  One of them might have committed double homicide.
  "I'll tell you what I said to the detectives.  But only after each one of you tells me about your testimony first."
  Alexander Love looked less than loving.  "I really don't think this is the time for us to be quibbling over who's on first."
  Abel Meyer looked like a gavel handed judge ready to render a verdict.  Finally he said,  "I find Jill's request not unreasonable.  We have not asked her to come here to extract information from her like a dentist extracting a tooth."
  The others exchanged glances. Alexander gave a nod of compliance and lowered himself to a cushion on the floor.
  Ian threw himself into a chair that didn't look big enough to support his frame. "I'm willing to start," he offered. 
  Anubis gave a silent nod.
  Ian beamed me a look of encouragement.  "These two big fellows interviewed me.  Each one must have been at least six foot four.  They grow cops big around here.  Maybe they're on a macrobiotic diet!  Whatever--I think these guys were picked for the intimidation factor. I got the definite impression they weren't regular detectives.  There were so many folks the police had to clear that I guess they pulled in some extras for the job.  My cops seemed a little bumbling.  It was like they didn't know what questions to ask. So I just downloaded my story.  Byte by byte.
  "I told them that I'd come to Pilgrim Farm for--would you believe this was supposed to be my goddam vacation!   I had come up here, Anubis, because I wanted to go to your workshop.  I brought Jill up here with me."  He shook his head in my direction, shot me a look which I took to be an apology.  "I'm the one that twisted her arm to come.  She had originally selected Enneagram from the menu...."
  Not surprisingly, Ian was reverting to his native language of computerese.  To me, the word "menu" meant something you could choose to eat,  just like "harvest" was something you pulled out of the garden.  Not out of the human body.
  "I had to explain to the cops what Enneagram was, which wasn't easy because I don't know myself.  The policemen tried to find out everything I knew about Dawn's, uh, accident.    They're throwing Dawn in now. I told them that I was walking along the path with Jill when we heard a girl scream.  And that afterward, I'd seen the body in the water and watched the rescue. That I'd seen  Alexander and the healers jump  in to help.
  "They wanted to know what my connection was with the Eyes of Horus.  I told them that I had been studying magic for the last fifteen years, working with a system similar to the Golden Dawn.  Had no time to join a group, but I worked by myself, in a corner of my bedroom, almost every night."
  I was rocked at this revelation of a hidden life from this teddy bear of a man that I'd known almost as a brother.  This too sane, unimaginative computer programmer....
  "I related the story that Diana had told in class yesterday...the blood-covered deer's head that she had seen on that earlier night watch. The cops' ears popped up at this.  They thought maybe that someone had targeted Diana all along. I tried to explain that it was probably an astral deer that Diana saw. But once I said 'astral deer,' I found myself with a lot of explaining to do.  I had to give these guys instruction on the theories of astral projection.  It was around this time that the cops looked at each other and decided that I was some kind of nut case.  And they suddenly lost interest in what I had to say."
  Alexander Love and Holly Summerfield were staring at Ian like he was a television screen. Anubis' reaction was much different.  Without glancing up, he was jotting down every word in a black notebook.
  "That's it," Ian ended.  He looked crestfallen, like he wished he could have come up with a more climactic ending.
  I knew that my anger was displaced but I felt myself simmering that Ian's interview had sounded as unpressured as a springtime stroll down a country lane.
  Holly was puffed up like a balloon ready to burst. "My turn," she called out.  She was sitting cross-legged on Anubis' bed.
  "The same two fascists interviewed me.  I had to go through the whole business about Dawn. I told them, Alexander, how you went to her rescue, you being a doctor and all. I told'em about those so-called healers putting on their little show. The whole works. I told the cops to forget about Dawn being foul play.  Dawn had an accident, short and simple.  In fact, Dawn was an accident!  The girl was a mess. Rumor even has it that she was doing drugs. Oh,I let'em know.  
  "They wanted to know who I hung around with here. I told them that I'd sometimes chum up to Victor. If I'd known they were going to give him a hard way to go, I would've soft pedaled that part.  But I sure didn't say anything against him.  I told them that we were both with the Eyes and how Victor is a good, solid man.  He's the kind of man every organization needs. People take him for granted.  He would lay down his life for the Eyes--for you, Anubis. He would. Oh, I know he doesn't do night watch.  He can't help that.  I think he needs nine or ten hours sleep to function.
  "The creeps asked me if there was anyone who I didn't get on with. I came right out and told them that Muriel Baxter wasn't my cup of tea.  I said that she was one cold, frozen old cunt...ah, old woman who wouldn't give you the time of the day.  I'm surprised that she even keeps coming around now that Gabriel's out.  They were real tight.  You can't convince me that she wasn't getting something out of him.  And the way she always was fussing at him to find a real job-- how reading tarot cards all day long didn't provide a share-savings pension plan.  Yeah, I brought up the name of Gabriel and then I had to go and talk about who he was.  How he used to be a top dog in the group.  It's true, Anubis, you know he was your main man.  Then I had to get into why I think he'd been tossed out.
  "You know, it's funny that Muriel was the only person except Henry Peacock who knew that Diana would be in that meditation room at three a.m.  Henry just knew because he was in from two to three.  Muriel getting Diana to switch with her was all too scripted, if you ask me.  Maybe Muriel had something to do with the attack.  Figure it out.  Oh, I clued them in."
  Abel Meyer held a hand to his heart, like you do when you're reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag.  "My dear Holly.  Your testimony was perhaps unnecessarily digressive."
  The room had suddenly become chillier, even as the calendar neared Lammas.
  I fixed my gaze a few inches above the heads of my companions.   "I'm having a very odd experience," I said, biting my lips for the lie. "Holly, as you were speaking about Gabriel, I saw him standing in this room as clearly as I can see everyone else.  Is his hair reddish-blond?"
  Holly gasped.  Alexander looked respectful. Ian appeared quizzical.  Only Abel Meyer seemed unfazed.
  "You saw him, all right."  Holly seemed relieved to wiggle out of the limelight.  "He just honored you with an appearance.  He's good at that sort of trick."
  "It's obviously my turn," Alexander said, shifting in his seat.  Everyone gave him the studied attention that his quiet voice manipulated a person into giving.
  "I was interviewed by Detective Makepeace.  I commented on the alluring sound of his name, reminding him that my own name is Love.  I told him that as a medical doctor, I could tell at once, when I entered the water to render assistance to Dawn, that she had already passed over to the other side.  Nevertheless, I had asked the healers to gather around.  That was more for their benefit than for Dawn's.  Their energies are such that they occasionally need release.  Otherwise, the energies become impacted inside the person and blockages can result."
  I had no idea whether he was talking about an intestinal obstruction or an emotional one.  There are some things you don't even ask.
  "Not that I doubt that the healers could not have helped Dawn at some level," Alexander continued.  "The teachings of Qabalah retain the belief that the living can still help the souls of the dead to move to a better place.
  "I specifically noted that Muriel Baxter had been one of those in the water trying to heal Dawn.  I don't share your unfavorable opinion of her, Holly. She is someone whom I would call  an Old Soul. A person who, through many reincarnations, has burned off much karma and as a result has achieved some measure of inner peace.
  "I expressed my opinion, making certain that Makepeace understood it was not a
 medical opinion, that the death of Dawn was due to an accidental fall.  Diana's death, conversely, could only have been murder.  It is unlikely that there would be two murders, with such different means of modus operandi, in the same place.  I had to admit to Makepeace that I had no thoughts or theories on the murder of Diana. That crime is in no way connected with our workshop or our organization. By the way, I see Diana's murder as a sex crime, even though I have no information that anything sexual occurred.  I've not heard that she was raped or violated sexually in any way.  But even if her only wound was the head wound, that could still be classified as a sex crime.  In the minds of these sociopaths, sex is all about power.  The biggest mistake that the layman makes, as well as some inexperienced police forces, is thinking that a sex crime has to involve the sexual organs.
  "When I was being questioned, I hadn't known that the suspicions had fallen on Rao.  I'd thought maybe a prowler had gotten in. Who knows?  I can't say I know everyone at the workshops.   There are dozens of people at Pilgrim Farm this week who are total strangers to me.  I've never, for instance, exchanged a word with anyone in the Silent Meditation group.  I couldn't, very well....
  "Abel, Makepeace asked me how I was connected with you. I provided a brief prospectus of the Eyes of Horus.  I think I convinced Makepeace that we were not some lunatic cult. Look at our member profiles. We're doctors and bankers and computer programmers--as ordinary a cross-section of Americana as you'd want to find.  What sets us apart, makes us superior, is our quest for spirituality.  We are in quest of more immediate forms of worship than are available in, for want of a better description, the brand name canned-goods churches.  Take Christianity as a for instance.  Jesus and the Twelve celebrated the Eucharist once, at the Last Supper. That was an immediate experience.  But for the past two thousand years, priests have stood up in the pulpit and and re-enacted that one experience! While their congregations have maintained a spectator role. 
  "The Eyes of Horus and like-minded magical groups are employing novel and experiential methods in their quest to find their God.  Or Gods. We want  individual experiences.  We want to be our own priests.  And we want to tap in to the power of all forms of worship throughout the ages.  The Egyptian.  The Greek.  The Nordic...
  "Makepeace asked me a few specific questions about my personal role in Eyes of Horus.  This line of questioning led to a discussion about the former foundational role of Gabriel.  And his subsequent...despicable actions."
  "Since Gabriel seems to be  here with us at this workshop, do you mind telling me who he was and what he did?"  I directed my question to Anubis.
  "I don't think we need to pull out that piece of dirty linen," Alexander said.
  "But you went into it with the police.  So it's bound to be part of the murder investigation.  Since we're all suspects, it affects all of us."
  I was sitting on the far end of Anubis' bed.  He reached out and hugged at my shoulder, bending over me like he was going to lead me to a dance floor. Lead me a dance, was more likely.
  But then he began speaking to me like I was the only person in the room.  "I have known Gabriel Spencer for twenty years," he intoned.
  That one sentence contained a mountain of pain.
  "Twenty years. Half of his lifetime. But not such a large percentage of mine, since I was already white-haired and wrinkled when I met him.  I have had no children so he was like what a son must be like.  However, our relationship was still one of equals.  We mutually influenced each other. It was synergistic.  My personality made him a little more mature and his made me feel...like the number of years of our age difference was subtracted from my own age.  
  I immediately thought "gay".
  "Our relationship was not a sexual one," he said, a mind reader.  "It transcended sex.  No sex could ever be as good as this.  The stimulation, the transfer of ideas like electricity!  The magic!  If you have ever had a relationship like this in your life, Jill, you are a lucky lady.  A man is lucky if he can even dream of such a relationship, because he has understood."  Abel's eyes glazed over.
  "Can you understand, Jill?"
  "I think so, because you're making me feel envious.  I've never had anyone that I've felt quite so strongly about."   Nor anything, I added to myself.
  "It was Paradise lost.  I suppose that paradise is always lost, eventually.  One is always cast out.  Don't you think so, dear Jill?"
  "How was paradise lost?" I asked quietly.   I knew that Ian, Alexander and Holly were in the room but I could not sense their presence.
  "Gabriel underwent a change.  In the course of perhaps six months, he utterly transformed. You would not think that a man of forty would undergo a personality metamorphosis. One's personality can flex to a certain degree.  It is like a rubber band.  You cam stretch out, it expands, but it always snaps back to its old form.  It can be partially reshaped, even pulled out of shape, but only so far.   It is said that the outer limits of one's personality are set, including the kinds of behaviors that it would be possible to indulge in.  For myself, I disdain airplane travel but I will get on a plane when necessary.  I will not, though, fly in a space shuttle Or bungee jump."
  "I guess there are some circumstances that could cause a major personality change," I said.  "Different people coming into your life.  Or mind altering substances.  Finding religion."
  "Gabriel did get involved with some people," Abel said.  "There was a young woman, in particular.  She was a member of  a group. Or I should say cult. They professed to practice a brand of sex magick, based on some of the workings of Aleister Crowley.  And Gabriel took the role of their priest.
  " I myself have kept the abstinence.  I need all of my energies for my magic, for my work."
  Looking at the ill old gentleman, remembering Alexander's regular monitoring of his blood pressure, I concurred that abstinence might be the wisest policy.  Abel Meyer didn't look capable of coitus, be it magickal or otherwise.
  "I can see how Gabriel would have been tempted.  This young woman and her friends likely made him feel younger, just as he had made me feel thus.   If a forty year old man has to choose between a beautiful young woman of twenty and this old--bonehouse--that you see before you, which do you think he will choose?"
  Had Gabriel also been abstinent those twenty years, I wondered. "Did it have to be an either-or?"
  "Yes, it did," Anubis cried with vehemence. "He would have been of no use for my own magical workings in that state of contamination.  So I made him choose.  Of course, his choice of Porphyria also meant that he was dislodged from my home and from my financial largess."
  "Of course."
  "The--divorce--was not a pleasant one.  Naturally, our relationship was becoming more and more strained.  Things were said that were best left unuttered.  Is there any event in your life, Jill, which though neither criminal nor pathological, you would be very loathe to have revealed?"
  I admitted that there was, and I wasn't about to self-disclose.
  "Precisely.   Such a thing, I have foolishly confided to Gabriel as many as ten years ago.  As our friendship was foundering, he threatened to advertise this very thing."
  My mind has always had a tendency to run to the most bizarre.  Pedophilia?  Incest?  Matricide?  Necrophilia?  "If it wasn't criminal, would it have mattered?  It must have been a very long time ago."
  Anubis tilted his head back and gave an ironic smile.  "Several centuries ago, yes?  I feel that old right now."  He added cryptically, "It would have mattered to those who would care the most.  And now I really must lie down and rest.  I lack the energy to uphold my part of our agreement to talk about our recent inquisition. I was also interrogated by Mr. Makepeace.  So many questions he has asked me."
  His voice grew weaker.
  Alexander interceded.  "I think everyone needs to leave now.  Maybe we can get the group together later and carry on with our studies.  If Anubis isn't up to it, we can all teach each other."
  There was an insistent  tap at the door.  Alexander grabbed the knob and admitted  Victor Stone.

Chapter fifteen

  Victor fell into the room.  He gave Anubis a penetrating glance and shuffled past us into the lavatory. I waited with anticipation and apprehension. I heard the running of water and the jingle of pills. I wondered if Victor was planning on swallowing the whole bottle. Just when I was ready to suggest that he needed checking on, he reappeared.  His dark eyes beaded out from sunken sockets.  I stood up so that he had room to drop down on the edge of Anubis' bed.  He managed a disapproving frown.  "It's hot in here.  Do we have to have so many, uh, bodies?"
  "I'm afraid so," Alexander whispered softly.  His blue eyes demanded further explanation.
  "I bet you provoked the bastards," Holly said.
Victor refocused his eyes of coal but otherwise looked blank.
  "I'd rather not discuss this with...." He glanced at Ian and me.
  "I think we need to know," Alexander whispered..
Victor looked resigned. He kneaded his fingers through the hair above his forehead.  He went through a ceremony of cracking each knuckle. Finally he began speaking in an urgent voice.. "Very well. It hasn't been a pleasant day....
  "It didn't take me long to arouse hostility in that sour faced Makepeace fellow. He kept hounding me to tell him about the belief system of the Eyes of Horus. I refused to give him one sliver of information.  There's a reason that occult lodges take a vow to keep their activities secret.  Can't have the uninitiated running around giving out misinformation. Harm can be done. You can't merely describe what it's like to call up the godform of Thoth into manifestation.  You have to experience it. 
  "When I refused to divulge our secrets, Makepeace was stymied. Stepped  out to consult that dispicable person he works with. Inez Sharp.  She immediately said, 'Haul his ass to headquarters.'
  "Didn't look like any headquarters to me, but how would I know? All I know is what I see on TV.  They drove me into town, where they had a small police precinct. They put me in this room with no windows and started the interrogation all over again. I reiterated that any questions relating to the beliefs, the structure and the operations of the Eyes of Horus were off limits.  Refused to give the names of any persons in the group.  I never told them your name, Anubis--not your actual name, not your Egyptian name."
Anubis had resumed his note taking.  He lifted his eyes from his notepad as Stone spoke his name.
  "They must have asked me a hundred questions about any contact I might have had with the two, for want of a better word, deceased.  So far as the, uh, woman with the ax in her skull is concerned, I could honestly say that I had never laid eyes on her before this conference.  I said nothing about what I thought was her extremely inappropriate behavior during yesterday's class.   I'm referring to her hysterical performance when she saw the astrally projected deer.  And her dropping and nearly breaking the Mirror of Hathor! I would never have discussed these things with the police because I would be disclosing Eyes of Horus business.  I ventured my opinion that this woman should never have been allowed to attend our conference.  Couldn't tell them why.  That would be revealing the nature of our work.  My refusal to give away our secrets rankled Mr. Makepeace and Ms. Sharp."
  I knew by now that the Eyes considered themselves a secret society, but for the life of me I couldn't see what secrets they had.
  "Perhaps there are circumstances that justify flexibility with the secrecy policy," Anubis offered.
  "I took the vow."
  The rest of what Victor said didn't make much sense to me. It was something about the student having to be ready in order for the teacher to appear.
Victor wiped his brow with his sleeve.  "There is something else, Anubis, that you need to know.  The police had gotten hold of the paper we circulated with the schedule for the watch.  They were all too interested in the fact that my name was the only one that didn't appear on the watch schedule.  Other than yours.  Oh, no one would ever expect you to actually take a watch, please don't think that I'm implying that!  Isis!  Osiris!  Horus!...."
The invocation of the gods seemed involuntary.  Victor clasped his hand over his mouth momentarily, seemed to settle himself, and resumed his story.
  "They, meaning Makepeace and Sharp, were astounded that I didn't do the night watches, like this proved that I'd be free to lurk in the bushes and then sneak into the shrine and bludgeon the poor Jones girl.
  "I felt pushed to confess to them why I had failed to perform this duty."  Victor glanced around the room as though he ardently wished that everyone but Abel Meyer would turn into toads. 
  "So now I have to confess to you.  I've had a--uh--nervous condition for most of my life.  It's called OCD. Obsessive-compulsive disorder..  I, uh, have to take medicine.  I take the medication at bedtime.  Once I take the drugs, I'm as good as dead for the next seven or eight hours.  I might be able to stumble out of bed at 3 a.m. in the event of a fire. But not for much less.
"I'm aware that one of the questions asked when I joined the Order was whether or not I was taking medication for a psychiatric condition.  I lied. I answered no...."
  His voice tailed off.  He looked much more humiliated by his "confession" than the situation called for. 
  The story pulled at my pity string.  "These medications are nothing to be ashamed about," I said.
  Victor sat hunched over, holding his head in his hands. It was obvious that he was through talking.
  The sun, the shadows and my stomach told me that it must be nearly suppertime.    "I could sleep now," I yawned.
  Ian started to follow me out the door.
  "I thought we might assemble the group for a ritual practice," Alexander said.         "It will give people an outlet of sorts.  The group needs to get together in order to recoup its energies.  The large ritual will be held tomorrow night at nine.  Our last night here-- if we're allowed to leave by then.  The police will certainly hear from me if they try to sequester us any longer.  I have patients scheduled later this week!"
  I made no promise to show up at his choir practice.  Once down the bend in the hallway, I told Ian that I needed his car keys.

Chapter sixteen

  Ian was at his most sarcastic. "You've maybe forgotten," he said. "We're marooned on Pilgrim Farm. What do you want car keys for?  Do you have a date?"
 "How long does it take to drive to New York City?"
 "Tommy, if you're trying anything crazy, it would be better for me not to know.  We could all be questioned again by the police."
He had that perverse habit of calling me by my nickname when he was the most grim and serious.  One would think it would be the other way around. "Then just set down your car keys and don't ask me anything," I said.
 "The city is a drive of two and a half to three hours from here."
 "I've got to talk to this Gabriel Spencer," I said.  "The trick is to slip away from the farm so no one knows I'm gone.  I think I can get out through the back door in the kitchen and run along the brush that leads out into the parking area.  Drive time, round trip, would be five or six hours plus however long it takes to find Gabriel.  I'd be back sometime in the early morning hours and no one would ever know I was gone.  If anyone asks about me, you can say I'm in my room sleeping."
 "No I can't.  I'm riding with you."
Rao still had not returned.  Peg Woodward, Holly Summerfield and a couple of people from the silent meditation group were scavenging through the kitchen pantry.  Sy Minor was fluttering around like a moth, although God knows that so far as the Pilgrim Farm predicament went, there was no lamp that would attract one.  He wore the same threadbare brown suit.
Ian started jabbering to me about invisibility again.  I don't think he actually believed that you could become invisible in the Houdini or David Copperfield sense of the word.  It was more like a blending in with the woodwork, coupled with inconspicuous movements and focusing your eyes and consciousness away from the people you wanted to avoid.  
 "They won't see us," he had assured me.  "Just think of yourself as part of a kitchen table and  keep walking toward the door."
 "Right.  But I never saw a kitchen table walk out a door yet."
 I made it halfway across the room before the voice accosted me.
"Hmmmm! We're going to try to put some kind of a meal together."  Peg Woodward gave me her brightest love-and- light smile.  "Oh, here's Jill, perhaps you'll help us."
 I could have smitten the woman with a blasting rod.  Not only was my invisibility gone, it was that dip of a Woodward woman who had called attention to me.  I overcame my urge to bitch her out.
 "I'm sorry," I said.  "I feel ready to drop. I'm going to my room to lie down awhile."
 "Not before you get some fresh air," Ian said, guiding me into the concrete yard in the back of the kitchen where trucks delivered milk or collected the garbage.
There were no policemen at the back entrance, only a fat jouled orange tomcat.  We moved slowly across the drive where, only last night, Muriel Baxter had shooed away the blue pickup truck.  Within two minutes we had reached the winding country road that led from Pilgrim Farm.  No sentinels there either. Ian put his foot on the gas while I pulled out a road map and studied the route to New York City.
 "Pretty good engine," I remarked and had reason to regret my word when Ian again lapsed into computer-talk and "search engines."  From under his seat, he pulled out his laptop and instructed me to enter the name "Gabriel Spencer."
He seemed deflated when I told him that I had the address already.  I'd lifted it from Dawn's address book.
 "I'd count on finding Gabriel at his place of business, " I said.  
 "We won't reach Manhattan until ten at night!"
 "Exactly. That's when I'd expect an occult bookstore in the East Village to be in full swing."
 Ian looked miffed, probably because it was he and not I who was supposed to be the expert. I cheered him up by reminding him that East Sixth Street between First and Second Avenue was dotted with Indian restaurants.  After we had handled Gabriel, we could stuff ourselves with Chicken Korma over basmati rice.
 I have never known anyone to find a parking space in the East Village but Ian must have pulled something special out of his closet of magic tricks. A Volvo was pulling out of a spot on East Sixth Street. Ian inched his van into it like a woman trying on a dress six sizes too small. I reminded him to make his laptop turn invisible if he ever wanted to see it again.
 The streets were vibrant with people of every conceivable nationality, skin shade, language, mode of dress or strata of life.  Democracy broke down only in age spectrum:  the elderly lacked proportional representation.  Cooking smells from dozens of restaurants grabbed at the faculty of smell. My sense of sound was enlivened by the multitudes themselves.  Vendors, selling essential body oils, incense, bangles, baubles, rings, sunglasses, watches and revolutionary literature assaulted passersby with their wares from postage-stamp sized store fronts or from collapsible tables pushed to the curbside. 
 I have always sensed a kind of magic in the energies of the street.  People came to the Village to partake of this indefinable type of energy; to bathe in it.  Those who did not live here could bottle it, carry it home with a Village Voice and take an occasional vicarious whiff.  I was uneasy with the knowledge that the root of this same energy pool could just as likely cause a riot in Thompkins Square or a fatal street knifing over a parking space claim.
 "I guess your typical Grenwich Village tourist doesn't cross East Broadway," I reflected. Ian and I made our way down East Sixth Street past the garish restaurants with the smell of curry hovering in the air.  We connected with First Avenue and turned down East Seventh. 
 I spied the battered blue pickup truck two spaces from the corner.  Ian roared with laughter at the "Magicians have crystal balls" bumper sticker.  I have always had a distaste for bumper stickers and never put them on my car.  Some yokel driving down 95 doesn't need to know how I feel about animals, politics or religion. 
 "Gabriel Spencer is nearby," I said.
 The small storefront window bore the bold letters of its name: Saturn Rising. Smaller letters advertised readings-magickal supplies.  The window was crammed with decks of tarot cards, volumes by Aleister Crowley, a couple of crystal balls, and a display of tarnished charms, passing for silver, of a variety of Egyptian and Indian deities. Wind chimes on the doorknob clanged to announce our presence as we squeezed through the narrow door.
The store was hardly wider than ten feet, but extended back several times that width. A mismatched line of bookcases hugged the right wall. The left side sported  display counters and tables stacked with oils, incense, candles and colored stones. Like every other place of its kind I had ever entered, the scent was the predictable amalgam of all of its ingredients. "Sacred Space" music streamed from a CD player.  The seven or eight customers made the place looked as crammed as a toy store on Christmas Eve.  With Ian hulking behind me, I squeezed past them with mumbled apologies.  All but one or two were men.  They formed a collage of blue jeans and black tee shirts.  Their eyeballs burned into the books like lasers.
 A buxom woman leaning over a counter pushed her dark hair aside from her face.  Several silver charm necklaces nestled against her lacy low-cut blouse.  "Can you find what you need?"  
 "We need to see Gabriel."
 "He's doing a reading now."  She spoke like she expected that to be the end of the matter.
 I tried to be inconspicuous as I checked my watch.  Ten-thirty.
 "We close at eleven.  You have an appointment for a reading?"
 I had hoped that Ian would speak up.  Instead, he had become a browser,  bending his head and squinting to read the titles on a lower shelf.
 "Gabriel knows we're coming," I lied, then turned to the stacks myself.  I was not about to let anyone be my gatekeeper. I looked over my shoulder.  "Just whistle when he' s free."
 With the pretense of browsing, I let myself wander further along the stacks.  The aisle narrowed, then ended in a tiny screened area.  A deep, dark timbered, prophetic voice spoke from behind the screen.   
 "The lightning-struck tower.  Do you realize what road you are walking along?  You don't often stop to read the street signs, do you?  You have just turned down the road to Damascus!  You are about to have an experience which will rock the foundations of everything you've ever been taught to believe.   Your life is never going to be the same again!  But after the lightning has struck and the fires have blazed, a lot of old garbage is going to get burnt up.   You know what this garbage in your life is...go sweep it into a pile so that you'll be ready to let it go when the cataclysm comes!"
 I tried to get Ian's attention.  He was lapping up the contents of a book by Eliphas Levi like a dog in a desert lapping up a saucer of water.
 I watched a young girl emerge from behind the screen.  Her hair and skirt were brightly colored, limp and long.  She was zipping up a small pocketbook.  Obviously she'd had to throw a few bills at Gabriel for his apocalyptic pronouncements.
 Ian looked like a child at Christmas who had been told to put a toy away.  In two strides he was at my side as, together, we stepped behind the screen and confronted Gabriel Spencer.

Chapter seventeen

The oriental rug on the floor contrasted with the three mismatched kitchen chairs and the cable spool which passed for a table.  The man at the table had reddish blond hair   long enough for the back to be twisted into a samaru style pony tail.   A candlestick lamp with a black shade matched the man's black silk shirt.  The dim lighting, coupled with the incense smoke screen, obscured the face.
I slipped into one of the kitchen chairs.  Ian took the other.
Gabriel Spencer continued shuffling his tarot deck, throwing out a variety of tarot spreads,  pushing the cards together,  shuffling again.  I hoped he didn't think I had come for a reading.
"The police left here an hour ago," He finally said as casually as if he were recounting the arrival of the mailman.
"I've had a session with them myself today,"  I said.
"I thought you were them coming back."
I had never thought of myself as looking like the police and I didn't take the remark as flattery.  I glanced at Ian, fearing that he was going to hang back and make me do all the talking.
"We're not detectives," I said.  "We're bystanders.  I've been at Pilgrim Farm all of three days and there have been two murders.  I'd call that an epidemic.  I need to know what's going on and how long it will be before the epidemic runs its course."
Gabriel looked pensive, almost peaceful.  His long silence made me more spooked than any kind of angry outburst.  Even worse, I knew that he read my discomfort and  relished it.  I shifted my lower legs around under that spool-like table.   I had once taken an Introduction to Philosophy course where a pompous old professor had gone on for a whole class about the tableness of just such an object.  I think his point was that its use determined its right to be included in the class of things called tables.  I kicked Ian in the shins.  
"I guess you were sent by Muriel,"  Gabriel said.
I was taken aback.  I couldn't see Muriel sending so much as a thought.  On the other hand, she was the the one who knew Gabriel.  She was the one that Gabriel had visited in his blue pickup truck.
Ian cleared his throat.  My virtual knight was about to come to the rescue.
"Look, you know these people," he said.   "What's your take on all this?"  
Gabriel gave us a bemused look and kept fiddling with the cards.
"We know you were up at the farm yesterday.  I saw you talking with Muriel. You were in the same blue  truck that's parked three doors down,"  I added.
"Anyhow,  it was there when we came in,"  Ian said.  "Can't vouch for now."
"What do you mean? Where would it get to?" A flash of anxiety furrowed Gabriel's brow.  He glared first at Ian, then at me,  his face  looking more and more like a scale.  He was weighing whether or not to talk.
  "I rode up to Pilgrim Farm last night to try to get Muriel to leave.  I  wasn't convinced of her safety."
"Why were you specifically concerned with Muriel?"  I asked.
He hesitated and rearranged his pony tail .  "We have history.  I guess you can say I have a soft spot for the old girl."
"Was she in any more danger than the others?"  I asked.
Again, a long silence.  Gabriel covered his face in thought.  He threw out another handful of tarot cards.  "I think so.   It's a long story."
"Gabriel," I said, "we drove down here from Pilgrim Farm because we think you have the inside scoop on what's happened up there. We can't linger too long  because the cops had forbidden any of us to leave at all. We sneaked out and if anyone misses us, we could wind up being  murder suspects.  I don't want to be falsely arrested.  I went through that earlier this year on my job in Baltimore - my former job - because an emotionally disturbed teenager said some things about me that weren't true. Once a lifetime is enough.  I don't want to be arrested twice in a year.   Are you with us or against us?  If you're with us, please tell us whatever you know about what's going on at Pilgrim Farm.  If you're against us, just tell us to get out." 
"Maybe," said Ian, "we could access one of those Indian restaurants around the corner."
"That sounds very civilized," Gabriel said.  "We will sit down and break paratha bread together."


The lighting in the restaurant gave off a dim orange glow.  I watched Ian stirring his fork through basmati rice and curry sauce.  Gabriel Spencer had ordered palak paneer.  Over the loudspeaker, a high pitched woman's voice droned on.  It was the same atonal singing that I have heard in every Indian restaurant I have ever entered.  At the table to our left, a young woman with a round face and rounder eyes appeared to be having a lover's spat with her boyfriend.  On my right hand side, two professionally dressed women in their thirties were debating the benefits of Prozac.
Gabriel looked too smug as he stuffed his face with rice and spinach.  He wasn't going to throw down the first card.
"Are you wired?" Ian asked conversationally.
"Are you kidding!"
"He means are you on the internet," I explained.  It was usually the first question Ian asked anyone. 
Gabriel readjusted his upturned ponytail.  "The store is."  He sounded bored. 
"I've read your articles in some of the old Eyes of Horus magazines," I spoke up.
Gabriel looked flattered.  "What did you think of them?"
I clenched my fists, knowing that I had to get the man talking.  "I could see that you were very active with the  Eyes of Horus.  Are you still?"
He shrugged a no.
The singer on the loudspeaker continued to chirp out her love story in an unknown tongue.  "What happened?"
Another shrug.  "Oh, you know how it goes.  People drift in and out of your life in any given lifetime...teach you whatever lessons you're supposed to learn during this go-round.  We've probably all known each other in a previous life." 
"Maybe we do have  past lives, but Dawn and Diana have just this week moved on to their future one and I've got a problem with that."  I gave a cheery little smile.  I didn't want to alienate the man by coming on super strong.
He stretched his upper body, clasping his hands behind his neck.  "I'm no longer a member of the Eyes of Horus."
I professed surprise.
"The leader and I had a few differences."
"Like what?"
He rubbed his forehead and twisted his upper torso.  I thought that he was getting uncomfortable with the slant of the conversation.  "Hard to pinpoint things."
Then, to my surprise, he jerked his body up straight and glared into my eyes.  "What would you say if I told you we'd been, like, best friends for twenty years?"
"I'd say that losing a friend of twenty years is a pretty big deal."
A cloud of anger darkened his face. "Aw, nothing's a big deal.  The man started turning into a damn control freak."
"What do you mean?"
"He started getting into my face.  Started getting into my life.  Didn't like my friends.  Didn't seem to want me to have any.  Especially girls...ah, women. He put out a theory  that sex lowers the spiritual vibrations.  Look, if he wants to preserve his pecker  for posterity, Let him! Someone can mummify it after he makes his transition.  But that's not me, okay! I believe we should use what the gods give us.  He actually accused me of dabbling in black magic!"  Gabriel gave me a look of sullen self righteousness.  He finished with an indifferent shrug. "If you get my meaning," he added.
I wished I did.  "Of course you're referring to Anubis?  Abel Meyer?"
"Anubis or Abel Meyer or whatever he wants to call himself on any given day."  Gabriel turned back to his spinach and cheese.  "Neither one of them's his real name."
"What is his real name?"
"Try 'Ernst von Rauchenburger' on for size."
I did.  It didn't fit.  I watched Ian set down his cup of muddy Indian coffee. 
"Who is Abel Meyer?"
"The way I've been told the story, the way Abel...I mean Anubis...uh, Rauchenburger told it to me... the real Abel Meyer was some poor guy that got himself killed somewhere in Germany sometime during World War Two. I think you can understand that Anubis, I'll use that name, was rather vague with me on the details of the death of Abel Meyer.  He might have died in the camps. His killer might even have been Ernst von Rauchenburger but I don't really know that." Gabriel Spencer smiled up at me.  "It was before I was born."
Ian woke up.  "This fellow Anubis, this Abel Meyer that we know, the guy that leads the Eyes of Horus, are you telling us that he's a big Nazi?"
"He worked as a guard in a concentration camp.  Is that big enough for you?"
Ian acknowledged that it was.
"After the war he escaped to Switzerland using the identification papers of Abel Meyer.  Later he moved to England and finally to New York.  He became this Abel Meyer.  That's the scoop.  At least that's what he told me. That was his big secret.  Our  big secret. But since he's chosen to tell all kinds of fictions about me, I don't see any reason why I should keep quiet about him any longer."
"Did Anubis throw this girl Dawn off the cliff ?"
Gabriel looked preposterous.  "I doubt it!"
"Did he bash Diana Jones' head in  with an ax?"
"I don't know this Diana Jones but my guess is no.  No to both."
"Did you?"  I asked.  
Gabriel laughed loudly.  "Girl, I thought you had some sense."
The round faced woman at the next table was dabbing her eyes with a kleenex.  Her boyfriend reached over  to placate her.  The Prozac women called for their bill.
"What were you doing up at Pilgrim Farm?"  I persisted.
"That's what the police wanted to know. I thought I'd better come clear with them about riding up there because it would look like I was hiding something if  they found out anyhow. The truck eats a lot of gas.  I filled it up at a station a mile down the road from Pilgrim Farm.  I'm afraid I left a plastic trail; what would we do without credit cards?  Honesty's the best policy, huh?"
Ian raised his head and his voice pitch.  "I think so and since you're saying you're not responsible for these murders, then let's make sure we're honest with one another."
"Hold on a minute," Gabriel said and sunk back into his chair.  "I said I didn't commit the murders.  But I didn't say that I wasn't responsible."

The Indian waiter was swarming around our table like a crow dodging traffic to get to a road kill.
"I think they're trying to close up," Gabriel said.  "We can go back to Saturn Rising."
It was after midnight.  Saturn Rising was the last place I wanted to go on the face of the earth.  Gabriel had finished his meal but not his story.  The hordes on East Seventh at Second Avenue were beginning to thin out.  Those who still wandered the streets looked more marginal, more menacing, more doped. 
Gabriel had produced keys and was juggling with the padlocks on the now closed bookstore.  "Closed" actually was an understatement.  A metal grill now covered the width of the building from the top of the picture window to the pavement.  The space was transformed so much that a passer-by would never have known he was walking past  Saturn Rising.
Gabriel hoisted the grill up and unlocked the bookstore door, bolting it behind him once we'd passed inside. We huddled in darkness at the back of the store where the tarot readings had taken place. I thought of how easy it would be for Gabriel to grab a blunt object and batter us to death.  I could see the news story. "Social Worker, computer programmer found ritually slaughtered in East Village occult bookstore."  It wouldn't make the headlines of the New York Times.  But it would  rate at least a couple of paragraphs in the Metro section.  I breathed  easier when Gabriel lit the tiny black shaded lamp and cozied up with us on the oriental rug.
  It was a struggle for me to focus.  My consciousness kept trying to slip out of gear.  This can happen when you find yourself  suddenly transported to a fantastic setting, one where you've never ventured before.  The closed, dimmed  East Village occult book shop,  the muted glow of that one lamp,  the olfactory assault  of scented candle wax,  was lulling my brain into a fugue state.
Gabriel picked up the story line without prompting. "Anubis trashed me.   I hadn't done anything to deserve it. Through the store I'd gotten to know a group of women, thirteen of them all told.  They had formed a Circle. They met at the bookstore whenever there was a full or new moon and of course on holidays."
"Holidays?" I played dumb.  Like the Fourth of July?  Labor Day?
"Equinox, solstice. Lammas. Samhain.  You probably call that Halloween.  Anyhow-- I did some work with the cov...ah, Circle.  This was the beginning of the end with Anubis.  Our last year together--we'd shared an apartment for at least fifteen years, you have to do that in Manhattan because of the cost of living--that last year was  constant arguing.  The guy never stopped carping at me, for chrissake!
"You know how it is with a fireworks display at the end? They shoot them all up in the air at once and that's the grand finale. That's about the way it ended with us. All the fireworks exploded and Anubis gave me one hour to clear out of our apartment.  No small deal for me because he was paying the rent and most of the bills.  He forced me to have to go to my mother for money! It was either that or move into Penn Station.  I was also banned from the  Eyes of Horus.  This happened to be after the guy had publicly named me his successor!"
It did cross my mind to wonder who the public was.
"What does all this have to do with the murder of those two women?" Ian asked.
Gabriel's eyes flickered.  "You can't wait, huh? All right.  I'll bleed it out. Not my finest moment, I'm ashamed to say. Getting even.  I wanted to hit back at  Rauchenburger-Meyer-Anubis.   I decided to leak the Nazi story.  If I'd simply started singing it out, people might think I was just talking trash.  It turned out that I had to go down to Philadelphia, and I made it a point to look up Dawn Vanderbosch.  Dawn has what  you might call low self esteem...."
"She doesn't anymore,"  I reminded him.
"Oh right.  Right."  Gabriel looked chastised.  "But--well, she did. Anyhow, I laid it on her.  I told her that her old guru Anubis  had a heavy past. A past as a concentration camp guard working for no less a personage than Adolph H. I let her know that  he wasn't Abel Meyer.  That he might even have killed the real Abel Meyer..."
"Dawn didn't doubt you?" I asked.
Gabriel shook his head.  "Not possible.  You need to know Dawn."
"It's hard to believe Anubis is  that old," Ian mused.
"He's brushing up to 80.  I swore Dawn to secrecy, which guaranteed that she'd go up to Pilgrim Farm and spill out the story. That, ladies and gentlemen was my little master plot.  I knew the story would get sloshed around up at the Farm and that Rauchenburger-Meyer-Anubis would take a hit. I never wanted  innocent people to get hurt." 
 Gabriel seemed to disappear inside himself for a minute.  When he returned, he said "I knew that the ass-sucker was on a power trip.  How could I have know that he was a murderer?"
I waited  for him to finish the thought.
"Why should I be surprised? You hear things like that on the news every day.  A landlord in this city cut a tenant into pieces because she was trying to organize a rent strike.  Put her body in a trunk in the storage area.  A mother killed her three kids by putting poison in their hot chocolate because her new boyfriend didn't like kids.  Murder's a fucking epidemic.  But I still didn't peg Alexander Love as a murderer.  I didn't think he had the goddam balls.  You didn't either,  I bet!"

Chapter eighteen

   My heart started thumping so hard that I expected to see it come popping out of my chest like a cartoonist's depicting of a character in love.  I guess love could make a heart beat like that but the only time I've had the experience is with fear.  And I was afraid now.  I realized that I had not taken a lot of time to actually ponder on who the murderer might be.  I had some unformed hope of it being a mad dog stalker from the outside. Either that or Gabriel himself.  Perhaps he was the killer after all, putting up a goal line defense to get Ian and me to see Alexander as the one with the bloody hands. 
 Ian rescued me just then because I don't think I had the breath to ask a question.
"You say that Alexander's the killer.  Why should I believe you? How do I know that it's not you?"
I had never heard Ian so confrontational.  Maybe that was because he had never before faced a confrontation of this magnitude.
"I can't prove it wasn't me.  Or you.  Or her."  Without looking at us, Gabriel absently shuffled a deck of tarot cards, throwing cards out with seeming disinterest.  He held the first card under the black shaded lamp. 
 "Here you see the card called the Hierophant," he said.   "The leader of the spiritual community.  Anubis himself."   He flipped over another card.  "The three of swords.  A  big red heart pierced by three swords.   I read this card as a reflection on Anubis' health.  The man had three heart attacks, you know."
I said I didn't.
He tossed another card into the pile.  "Knight of swords.  Notice that the sword is upraised, ready to cut. The horse and rider are charging into battle.  Alexander Love, the loyal lieutenant,  protecting Anubis in word and deed."
I knew that there were 78 cards in most tarot decks Fifty-six of them are the four suites that are a lot like modern playing cards. The other twenty-two cards  are considered more important and have even undergone Jungian analysis. I prayed that Gabriel was not going to run through the whole pack.
He threw down more cards. "Here are a couple of cards representing Alexander Love's mental state. The four of pentacles. Look at this greedy character clutching the gold coin.  This person craves money and power. That's followed by the seven of pentacles... you see a sad looking guy mulling over the yield of his crops..  Failure.  Alexander sees his get rich scheme slipping away."
"You can get rich being the head of the Eyes of Horus?"  I asked.
Gabriel seemed to focus his whole attention on the cards.  He was mumbling more to himself than to Ian or myself.  He flipped over another card.
  "The High Priestess, sitting primly between the two Masonic pillars. Who else but Muriel?  Although I must say she doesn't measure up to the High Priestess in being virginal.  But she has the occult knowledge. And she also has the money.  Money that the silly woman has been doling out to the Eyes of Horus for years.  It's endowments for now. They're probably in her will as well."
That was news to me. I haven't had a lot of experience with the type of person who hands out endowments.
Gabriel stretched his hands over his head and yawned, amplifying his pose of indifference.  "See what we have next.  The Page of Cups. Hmmm.  Interesting. A page often represents an immature person. . Cups are like Hearts in the playing cards. They're usually considered a female suite. Therefore...I take this  page to be Dawn.  And what follows? The Ace of Swords.  Swords is knowledge as well as trouble, and by this time Muriel has both because Dawn has hit her with Anubis' secret.  So now Muriel has this knowledge. And she has big league trouble."
He drew a few more cards. "The nine of swords.  The figure in this card has awakened in the middle of the night in a sweat. The Dark Night of the Soul. Here again is  Muriel, all torn up about what action she has to take now that she knows Anubis' secret past.
"Next, the six of swords.  Journey by water.  Now that Muriel has the dirt on Anubis, what if she decides to run home from Pilgrim Farm right away and get her lawyer to stop the endowment? I doubt that Dr. Love would care much for such a departure.
"Now the nine of pentacles.  The wish card.  You see the figure in a garden, surrounded by the golden coins. But the card is upside down.  It doesn't look like Alexander is going to get his wish. The wish being Muriel's bread."  He stared at the next card.  "This is absolutely incredible!  Finally, the Ten of Swords.  A figure lying on the ground with ten swords stuck in the back. Looks like murder to me, and murder is what's happened. But can you see the sun rising in the background?  That's a portent that things aren't as bad as they appear.  Alexander's gotten rid of Dawn and Muriel but he's still hoping to  find some way of making the sun rise on his fortune.
"Ironic, though," Gabriel continued . "If it hadn't been for Muriel's wanting to change her endowment to write the Eyes out, Alexander Love might have welcomed Anubis' downfall.  The old man, exposed for what he was, wouldn't have any choice but to give up his position.  Alexander would take over as head of the order.  Like I was going to be."
"I'd think that giving up the Eyes of Horus would be the least of Anubis' problems," I said.  "Former Nazis  get booted out of the United States."
Gabriel gave a blank stare, like he'd never considered the thought. "I don't give a damn about Muriel's money, myself.  The difference between me and Alexander is that I really do believe in the magical worldview.  Alexander is a fake.  He's a medical doctor.  He knows better than anyone that the old man's standing in the check out line.  A few months, a year or two, Alexander would be willing to wait it out because he knows that he would get control of the money eventually.  But if Anubis went down in flames, Muriel could take her endowment and give it to the Adult Literacy Program!"
"But Gabriel," I objected, "Muriel wasn't the one who was murdered last night!  Diana Jones was. The young aspiring actress .  Diana the Goddess of the Hunt."
"I know," Gabriel said.  "That' the downside to having the night watchpersons wearing hoods and robes.  Alexander was unthinkably careless.  I never thought that one of my mother's stupid  migraines would one day save her life."

Chapter nineteen

Ian floored his accelerator, trying to get us back to Pilgrim Farm before anyone discovered that we'd gone AWOL. .  Every ten minutes or so he intoned, 'Holy Shit!"
"Can you see Muriel as Gabriel's mother?" I asked.
"Holy Shit!   It wouldn't take much to convince me of anything right now."
He drove a few more miles into the still night.  The moon, now waning but barely, beamed its silvery light. 
"Do you accept the verdict of the tarot cards?"  Ian asked.
  I suspected that a skilled reader could pull any ten cards out of the deck and construct any fable he wanted to.
 I took a deep breath.  "Muriel's the one that did it.  Muriel is the murderer."
"Holy shit!  Where do you get that from?"
"Gabriel lied about Alexander.  He lied to protect his mother. Let's start at the beginning.  Gabriel tells the Nazi story to Dawn because he wants to stop his mother's bleeding out his inheritance to the Eyes of Horus.  As long as Gabriel was the number two in command, he'd have had no objection.  Like he says, Anubis is old and sick and Gabriel is the successor. Suddenly all that changed.  Gabriel is now the fallen angel but mama continues to throw around her money."
	"You're building more of a case for the murderer being Gabriel than Muriel," Ian said.
"I don't think so.  He wouldn't have mistaken his mother for Diana Jones, robe and hood or not.  He had no idea when Muriel was supposed to be going on the night watch.  And he had already come to Pilgrim Farm and left without doing anything to her."
Ian looked doubtful.  "What would be Muriel's motive?"
"Not wanting to be caught up in the scandal of subsidizing a Nazi.  If word got out to authorities that Anubis really is this Ernst von Rauchenburger, it could make world headlines! I see arrest, trial, conviction, deportation, God knows what else.  Muriel might even be tried as an accomplice for underwriting Anubis' group.  Who's going to believe that she didn't know who he was, when her own son was living with the man for twenty years!  Come to that,  she might even have been trying to protect her son by putting a silencer on the story..."
"...By murdering Dawn.  Some silencer that is!" Ian mocked.  "And even if Muriel did throw Dawn off that cliff, why would she kill Diana?"
"For the very reason you asked the question.. To cover up killing Dawn.  To make it look like the work of a serial killer."
Ian snorted.  "I can't see Muriel as an ax murderer."
"Typical reverse male chauvinism," I chided. And then I had another thought.
"She drugged me."   I hadn't known it until I said the words.  "That first night, after Dawn's death, she came to my bedroom.  She told me she didn't think Dawn was an accidental death--she should know, huh?  She picked my brain to see what I thought.  Then she made an excuse to use my bathroom and she stuck a crushed up sleeping pill into my toothpaste tube!  Or my toothbrush or even my water glass!"
Ian whirled around to give me a long stare.
"You'd better watch the road.  Not my face."  I was getting steamed..  Here I was taking the risk, putting out my theory, and was getting slapped down for my efforts.
"After Muriel had gone off to her own room, I went into the bathroom to get a drink and brush my teeth.   I was out for eight hours straight.  I never sleep that long. In fact, I bet that if I have my glass, toothbrush or toothpaste tube analyzed, some drug trace will show up.  I didn't turn on the bathroom light when I went in, or maybe I would've spotted something."
  It's strange how the brain works.  The thought of being drugged had never seriously crossed my mind.  Suddenly, riding along that road in the early morning hours, I knew it with certitude.
I pushed my idea.  "I believe that the only reasons Muriel came to my room that night were to sound me out and slip me that drug. She knew that something would be going on that night down by the meditation room. You remember the image of the deer that had terrified poor Diana while she was on her first watch? You and Anubis and Holly Summerfield might believe that the deer was projected astrally from the East Village in Manhattan.  Holly said as much when she commented in class that the deer business was just Gabriel up to his old tricks.
"I personally believe that Gabriel Spencer paid a late night visit to Pilgrim Farm. He had learned from his mother that a hysterics prone novice would be in the meditation room at a given hour--someone he could scare. Someone gullible enough to believe it was magic."
Ian again took his eyes off the road.  "Thank you very much!  Now you're calling me gullible."
I threw up my hands and rolled my eyes upward.  Through the windshield I caught an image of a spectacular star studded sky.  The stars never shine that bright in cities, there is too much summer smog. In that moment of disjointedness, I felt that I had a closer connection to the galaxy than I had to terra firma.
"Stop being so sensitive," I almost shouted at him.  "We don't have time for hurt feelings.  We have to catch a murderer!"
Ian gave a forceful exhalation.  "All right. Spill out the rest of the Muriel theory."
"All of her behaviors since she came to see me in my room have been suspicious. First, since that night, she's hardly troubled to recognize my existence. But I've kept track of hers.  I saw her go to Anubis' room to let him know what she had learned--which, as it turned out, was that Anubis was a Nazi!
"I heard her phone Gabriel from the garden. The gist of the conversation was Dawn's death.
 "I saw Muriel at the back door of the kitchen, shooing Gabriel away when he drove up to try to get her to leave.  Anyone else in their right mind would have left Pilgrim Farm. A murderer was running amok.  Muriel, more than any other person there, should had reason enough to bail out. First, she knew the same secret that Dawn knew.  Second, she wanted to change the endowment.  Third, she needed to divorce herself from Anubis the Nazi. So--why didn't she leave? Because she wasn't worried about getting killed.  She was doing the killing....
"And because she wasn't through killing yet. The police could easily have connected her with the murder of Dawn. The two knew each other. They lived in the same city. Muriel had pushed for Dawn's admittance into Eyes of Horus. They'd traveled together in the past--but not on this trip.  That's significant of itself. Then  Dawn discloses this sordid story about Anubis. Muriel had plenty of reason to want to slam the lid on that."
 I paused long enough for Ian to get my emphasis. "But not Inez Sharp, not Mr. Peacemaker or whatever his name is, no one is going to connect Muriel with Diana Jones. None of us knew Diana. There was total absence of motive. But don't you think it's just too snug a fit that Muriel pleaded a migraine and asked Diana to take over her watch?  And I'll tell you something else..."
Ian stepped on the gas and waited for me to continue.
"Muriel hated Diana Jones."
"Oh-kay!"  He was trying to humor me now.  "If you say so. Are you sure we've attended the same classes?  I didn't notice anything."
"A man wouldn't," I said.  "Unless Muriel had slapped Diana across the face while trying to pull her hair out, a man wouldn't notice anything at all. There was  body language aggression. I saw Muriel Baxter shoot Diana Jones a look of unmitigated animal hate. Maybe Muriel borrowed Rao's hatchet and hacked Diana to death simply because she enjoyed doing it."
"You're going to test this theory how?" Ian asked.  "You're going to ask her?"
"I'm going to sleep."
I leaned my head against the back of the seat and shut my eyes. I had no hope that sleep would come but it must have.  I caught myself awakening from a confused collage of a dream about the people and places that I had passed like ships in the night, in the phantasmagoria of those East Village streets.

Chapter twenty

  We saw no guardians at the gate.   To be extra cautious, I told Ian to drive past Pilgrim Farm until we could find a spot to hide the car.  Our timing was perfect.  The gray light of early dawn had given way to the first orange splash of sunrise.  We stashed the car between some bushes and cut across the fields.  What is more natural than a couple at a New Age retreat taking an early morning walk?
 If our minders accosted us, we could always whirl to face the East and swear that our religion required a ritual to greet the morning sun.  If I stumbled across a pie of cow dung, so much the better.  I could pretend to burn it and swear I was a practitioner of Agni Hotri.  There are probably all kinds of laws against cops' interfering with prisoners' religious practices.
With most of Pilgrim Farm guests only beginning to roll over in their beds and check their clocks, we ambled through the main door of the old monastery. I looked around for any sign of Rao. But the Pilgrim was nowhere to be found. Apparently he was still the prime suspect.  He was probably lying in some filthy hole of a jail somewhere.
I wandered into the kitchen, curious as to what was happening with the meal service.  Peg Woodward and a couple of her students had taken over the kitchen brigade.  I recognized silver-haired Cindy, the woman from Enneagram who had cried when she described leaving that non-growing husband.  Cindy's waistline didn't have that problem, I saw.  I pulled open cupboard drawers until finally I found a can of coffee.  Real coffee.  Within minutes I had that marvelous drug dripping into every coffee beaker I could find, never mind that the beakers might have been labeled decaf.
Cindy's face was puffed up from tears.  "It's so...devastating!  So terrible! I can't wait to get home!"
"How much longer do you think the police will hold us here?"  I asked.
Peg Woodward had moved in close enough to violate my spatial field.  Different individuals and cultural groups all have their own ideas about space boundaries.  Even two cats sunning themselves in a yard will leave about four feet between them.  I knew without looking that Peg was standing only one foot behind me.  Maybe we do have etheric bodies, astral bodies and auras that project out several inches from our body of flesh and blood.  These other bodies and auras get jostled if someone gets too up close and personal.
"Hmmmm," Peg said.  "I don't think they can keep us beyond tomorrow.  All the workshops will have ended by then.  I mean...the murders sort of ended them, but if there hadn't been these murders, the workshops would have ended by then...." She let the thought dangle.
I drank two cups of coffee. Fortified, I marched up to the door of Muriel Baxter.   I knocked loud enough to awaken the whole hallway. A couple of Uniforms were standing guard duty near the stairwell but Muriel herself did not seem singled out for special protection. That told me that the cops had not made any progress in their investigation. They saw Muriel neither as the murder target nor the committer of the deeds.  One female cop gave me the eyeball treatment but the woman made no attempt to chase me from Muriel's door.
I tried to get used to Muriel in her new roles.  The mother of Gabriel Spencer.  The murderess of Dawn Vanderbosch and Diana Jones. A few cracks showed in her facade.  Her hair was barely combed.  Makeup had been beyond consideration. The top of her body wore the attire of wealth:  a silken wine colored designer blouse and a string of pearls that I didn't think was costume jewelry. After that she must have given up because the rest of the ensemble consisted of a pair of  wrinkled lime warmup pants and pink house slippers.
She gestured for me to sit.  She took the one chair.  I sat on the bed.
"Muriel," I asked, "why are you still at Pilgrim Farm?  I'd thought your son came down here to take you home."
Muriel's face went blank.  "My son?" 
Perhaps she had killed Diana Jones because she recognized Diana as a rival actress.  "Right.  Gabriel Spencer. Your son.  I just came from his store in the East Village."
   Muriel sucked her lower lip.  "Oh, so that cat has clawed its way out of the bag, has it?"  She pushed several loose strands of silver hair from her face,  then let her hands massage her forehead long enough to hint that the headache still lingered. "Well--so what?"
"He told me about his little game, 'Spread the dirt about Anubis.' He knew that if he told Dawn, he told the whole group.  Dawn the pawn."
Muriel's mouth grew more taut.  "Oh, was that it?" she said tonelessly. "Gabriel  has always been comfortable being a user."
"You haven't told the police that you were the intended victim in the meditation room--not Diana."
Muriel gave me a stern, chilly glare. Something about that look made my blood run cold.  I thought of a  stick of hard chalk screeching down a blackboard.  I had little doubt that I was looking into the eyes of the killer.
 I shifted my weight on the sagging mattress and stared out the window.  If I squinted, I could see the dirt path that led to the bluff over the ravine.  
"What are you going to do? Are you going to sit here until you're murdered?" I asked.
Another withering look.  "We have murders in Philadelphia too."
"You're not worried about the murderer coming here to get you?"   I pressed.  "Or already being here?"
"Not particularly."  Her tone was a crisp, brusque and unconcerned mixture that I had never come across in anyone else.
I stood up and glanced out the window, all the time knowing that I should be watching my back.
   "Who would be the one person at Pilgrim Farm to have no fears about being murdered?" I asked.  I must say that Muriel really did look ill.  There was a sunken recess under her eyes. Her skin was floppy.  She appeared dehydrated.
 I sat back on the unmade bed.
"You think I'm the murderer."  This was said without emotion.  "Why am I not disappointed, Miss Thomas?  Originally I had taken you for someone who was slightly more elevated  than  a complete numskull.  Few people are, you know. Now I see that you're just hoi polloi."
"That kind of elitism doesn't surprise me coming from you," I struck back. "I'm sure your Nazi friend Anubis subscribes to the same."
Muriel's face, first pale, colored with anger.  "You are very wrong! Listen--I've known Abel Meyer for twenty years.  I met him through my son, for God's sake! Twenty years I believed in Abel Meyer and that little wretch Dawn pulls it all down  in ten minutes!"
"I can see where she would need to be silenced," I said.  "Otherwise, you wouldn't be in a very enviable position. Anubis has been picking your wallet for a number of years.  Who knows, you might even get accused of harboring a Nazi who has entered this country under an assumed identity."
  Muriel walked toward the door and put a shaking hand on the knob.   "Leave my room immediately!"
For all my years in child abuse, I am not a person who likes conflict.  Argument and accusation make my stomach flop.  But I can't stand not to get to the root of a problem, and sometimes I find myself forced into confrontational situations.  I jimmied my body further back on Muriel's bed, the way a cat does when you try to coax it to go outside and do its business.  "The police are in the hall.  The only way I go is if I bring them in and start singing to them."
Muriel's body slumped slightly in her chair but she still held her head high. "Very well.  Continue."  She spoke like one who is born to give commands.
"You have a motive for pushing Dawn off the cliff. Hushing her up.  Later that first night you visit my room with your upside-down disinformation.  You don't try to convince me that Dawn's death is an accident.  That could make me suspicious.  Just the opposite, you build up a case for it being a murder. You tell me about her fear of heights, and how she'd never wander near the edge of a cliff. That's something that the police can check out with her parents, of course."
"They can indeed, and with her psychiatrist," Muriel said.  "She had one, you know."
We were each bluffing.  I had no idea which direction to go with this, but here was Muriel trying to read my map. I just wish I'd had one.
"You also drugged me," I said.  "What was that drug?  I'll ask my doctor to prescribe it when I need a good night's sleep."
"Rohypnol," she said breezily.  "I got it from Gabriel.  I knew that he was sneaking up to Pilgrim Farm that night.  He wanted to scare one of the people in the meditation room and create a little stir with the group. Your room overlooks the area and I'd just heard you say that you suffered from insomnia. I was trying to protect Gabriel.  I apologize profoundly for that.  I did something stupid--and illegal."
I couldn't believe the audacity of the woman. Her voice echoed not the slightest nuance of repentance.
"Let's move on to your subsequent behavior," I said.  "You went to Anubis and challenged him directly on what Dawn had told you.  He tried to minimize it. I overheard.  I was in his bathroom at the time."
"What else did you manage to overhear?"
"I heard you phone Gabriel and tell him that Dawn was dead.  I saw him drive up here in his blue truck to talk with you."
"You've been a busy little beaver."  
"And then you got Diana Jones to fill in for you during the next night's meditation," I reminded her.  I knew that this could be a double-edged argument. 
"Yes, the poor dear.  It's a wonder she would agree at all after the way Gabriel had alarmed her the previous night.  To tell you the truth, she was reluctant to go but I shamed her into it. If you've never experienced migraine, you can consider yourself lucky." Her voice remained as crisp as a chirping robin in springtime.  Once she saw that she could not send me packing, the anger had subsided. She was making the best of having been dealt a bad hand of cards.
"And tell me please," she went on, "assuming that I killed Dawn, played along with my son's games, drugged you, and challenged Anubis about his past--in actuality I did all but the first--why in the name of Isis would I  want to take an ax and bash Diana Jones in the head?"
"That would throw the police off the track, because that was one murder you had no reason to commit.  Except that you hated her.  I saw it on your face."
Muriel threw back her head and laughed loudly.  As her head dropped back into her hand, the laugh turned bitter. "Miss Thomas, I've killed no one.  But I've done enough that I'll be destroyed.  It's over for me."  At that, her eyes took on a hopeful glint.  
"Who else up here knows about Anubis?" she whispered.
"Everyone," I lied. I certainly wasn't going to lay my neck and Ian's on the chopping block.  "Everyone knows by now.  It's safer that way, don't you think?"
"Miss Thomas, I'm not the murderer that you seek.  The meditation room is also visible from my window.  I was awake the night of Diana Jones' murder. For much of the night, until you burst into my room with the tale of the murder, I was lying flat on my back with my eyes closed.  Every half an hour or so I would have to get up and be sick.  It was during one of these trips to the bathroom that I looked out my window. I knew that it was 3:30.  One always knows the time during those endless nights when one is lying awake in the dark and deathly ill.  That was when I saw Alexander Love come running out of the meditation room."

Chapter twenty-one

  My mother always used to tell me that it was rude to stare, but no other word could describe the look I gave Muriel Baxter.
  "You saw this at 3:30 a.m.!  And you didn't call anybody?  He could've been caught!  Maybe Diana could have been saved!"  Even though I was trying to match Muriel's tone, I knew that I was getting loud.
  Muriel's voice was a glass of ice cubes rattling gently in a mint julep.  "He didn't have the ax in his hand, my dear.  He had left that in Diana's head.  Remember?"
  "But what did you think Alexander was doing out there?"
  "Based on the way Diana was trying to throw herself at him in  class with her mock histrionics, I had assumed that he'd gone there to make love to her."
  "Alexander wouldn't have known Diana was the one in the room!"  I thought I had caught her out, but she simply gave a shrug of a shoulder.
  "Easy enough for her to tell him."  Her hostility toward me seemed to have diminished, now that she saw she had evened up the scales about the identity of the killer.  I still considered the possibility that she was lying through her teeth.
  "The alternative explanation," Muriel said, "is that Alexander was expecting to kill me.  I mean--he had to do something before I left Pilgrim Farm, didn't he?  Because he must have known through Anubis that as soon as I left, I was going to change the terms of my endowment.  Under other circumstances, I could have begun the legal action right here at Pilgrim Farm.  I could have had my lawyer draw up the papers, so that the only remaining thing would be for me to sign them.  There was one slight obstacle.  My lawyer is Dawn Vanderbosch'  father.  Naturally, he is so preoccupied with other matters at this time that I wouldn't dare bother the poor man.
  "I chanced to meet Dawn through her father, you know.  How else do you think I could possibly have gotten to know somebody like her?  Her parents are upper crust but that doesn't always trickle down to the children these days, does it?  Sad."
  I knew that I had to cement her cooperation.  "Muriel, we have to go to the police with our story...."
  "Oh, we do?"  Again, the sardonic lilt.
  "I won't mention you drugging me, or your son sneaking up to Pilgrim Farm with the deer's head.  We can do damage control.  Things shouldn't go too badly for you since you claim you had no idea about the Anubis-Nazi connection.  As soon as you learned about that, you immediately announced your intention of withdrawing your financial support for the Eyes of Horus."
  "And what happens to Anubis?" she asked.  "I can not in all conscience continue to subsidize him.  Nor do I have any intention of seeing him go to jail.  He'd die there."
  "He's going do die sooner or later anyhow."  I knew that my argument lacked power, but it was all I could come up with.  "We can't just let Alexander Love traipse out the garden gate if there's a chance that he killed two women in cold blood.  One of them was supposed to be you, remember?"
  "Isn't it a little late for me to come prancing in as an eyewitness?  This Inez Sharp creature will want to know why I didn't speak up right away.  And what kind of proof can we give the police?"
  I thought about this, but I could only come up with Ian.  I needed him now.  He was an idea man.  "We're going to talk to Ian right now," I told Muriel.  "And you can't stay by yourself anymore.  You stick with one of us until we can get you off of the farm or until the police do whatever they're going to do."
  I thought that Muriel would balk at the involvement of another person.  
  "I'll need a few minutes, then," she said.  "I can hardly leave the room in these pants and slippers."
  Ian wasn't in his room so we had to hunt.  I only hoped that we wouldn't find him with Alexander. I shadowed Muriel the way I had seen some guard dogs do when they sensed that their owner was headed toward danger.  Ian finally cropped up in the dining room, draining the dregs of the morning coffee into a cup.
  "The three of us need to talk," I whispered to him.  "My room.  It's more out of the way. I'll start up with Muriel.  Give us five minutes.  Try not to let anyone follow you."
  He shot me a look of astonishment.   Perhaps he was remembering that, just a few hours ago, I had pinpointed Muriel as a double killer.  Now he just nodded.
  The first thing I did was check my bathroom door.  I'm not incapable of learning from experience, and I now had reason to be leery of these semi-private bathrooms.  I never knew the woman who had shared mine.  Since she had never spoken, I had taken her to be a member of the Silent Meditation group.
  Ian ambled into the room a few minutes later.  His eyes were asking me for my story.  
  I threw him the whole bomb. "Muriel saw Alexander walking from the meditation room during Diana's watch."  I did not need to add that I meant her last watch.  It would most likely turn out to be everyone's last watch.  I could envision the police dismantling the shrine.
  Even on these lumpy mattresses, Muriel managed to perch with a straight spine.  She folded her hands in her lap, a poster person for mindfulness practice.
  "Anything else?"  Ian asked.
  "In retrospect," Muriel said, "I'm certain that Alexander Love is the man you are looking for."
  "The man we're looking for!"  I raged.  "And you're totally indifferent?"
  Muriel crossed her legs at the ankles.  "Let me just say that I had not hoped to end my present incarnation just yet.  There are some issues with my son Gabriel that still need sorting out.  If I don't solve them during this lifetime, I'll only have to deal with them in the next.  It's quite tiresome, actually.  You see, Gabriel and I have been fencing with each other for thousands of years.  I was once a lady in Cleopatra's entourage.  It is well documented that he was close to Marc Antony."
  I wouldn't have dreamed of asking for the documentation.
  "I'm not one of those vain women who believes that she was Cleopatra," she continued.  "Usually, if you get that kind of imagery coming through in a past life regression, it means that you were connected with the famous person, not that you were they.  More recently I was a wealthy Frenchwoman in a high strata of society.  I held a salon every Wednesday afternoon.  I had the entire Parisian aristocracy at my feet.  Gabriel was a starving poet who had manipulated a regular entree into my circle.  But he displayed such bad manners that he had to be shown the door. So, you see, our relationship has long had its problems...."
  I wondered whether Anubis had a role in her previous lives, but thought I'd better not ask Muriel might tell me.
  Ian said,  "Your son, Gabriel, seems convinced that Alexander is the murderer, unless he's just saying that to protect you."
  "He 'proved' his hypothesis through a tarot card reading," I added.
  Muriel tilted her head to give us a sideways glance.  "I hope that neither of you is wealthy," she said.  "My money is the biggest burden I've ever had to carry.  In my next lifetime, I ardently hope that I shall be as poor as a church mouse.  For this lifetime, I will cut off my money and my relationship to the Eyes of Horus, now that I know what Anubis is.  The organization shall be written out of my will...if I live long enough to take action."
  I guess I wanted some indication that the Nazi story was more than Gabriel's concoction.  "What did Anubis say when you  told him what you knew?"
  Muriel sighed.  "He did not deny."
  "The problem," I said to Ian, "is how to package this for the police."
  Ian was staring at his hands like they were computer screens.
  "Is there some way that we might omit the role of Gabriel altogether?"  Muriel asked.  She might have been a screenwriter trying to write out a minor character.  In point of fact, she was just being a mother.
  "I don't see how," Ian said.  "He's the motherboard of the whole thing."
  "The thread that runs through the entire fabric," I added.
  Ian glanced up.  I saw that characteristic glint in his eyes.  "I have a thought," he offered.  "We have to make a move right away."

Chapter twenty-two
   I walked down the corridor that led to the room of Alexander Love.   As I rapped on  the door, I felt the same flash of anxiety that I had felt  when hitting the streets on a child abuse report cold.  You pray that someone will answer, but that hidden part of you that deals with survival jolts your common sense with a flash of relief when no one is home. You know that you will have to return to the same door the next day or even later the same day, but you have received a momentary reprieve from an unpleasant confrontation.  The long minutes on a strange doorstep are even worse when you are on a narrow porchless East Baltimore street, standing on the top doorstep like a platform and having every druggie on the block staring up at you.
No one was home in Alexander's room, but I wasn't in free yet.  Voices wafted out into the hallway from Anubis' door.  I knocked hard.  Alexander cracked the door and then pulled it open.  It was much the same as when I had gone to enroll in the workshop a couple of lifetimes ago.
"Anubis is resting for the ritual tonight," Alexander said in his softest unprojected voice.  
I wished I had made more of an effort to talk with Diana Jones.  Perhaps she would have given me a rudimentary acting course.  "It's you I want to talk to, Alexander.  Could we go for a short walk?"
He registered no surprise, asked no questions.  He seemed to presume that I was consulting him out of some need of my own.  I guess that he was right about that.
Once outside, he asked  "Where to?"
"I'm not particular," I lied.  "Maybe we could head for the direction of the overhang.  With all that's happened, I've been afraid to go near the place.  But it's supposed to be a beautiful view. Since this is my last day here, I would like to see it."
He agreed. We strided in silence until we got past the vegetable garden.         Alexander was the first to speak.  
"I don't know what to think about these tragedies.  My first thought was that Dawn Vanderbosch' death was accidental.  What do you think, Jill?  In light of happened with Diana, am I entitled to revise my opinion?"
We took the turn in the woods that leads to the overhang.
"You're entitled," I said.  "Accidental death and murder are two different entities.  They both happen. "  I sucked in my breath.  "It's the deaths that I wanted to talk to you about.  I've been very viscerally upset over these deaths."
He touched my arm.  His voice sounded so kindly that I caught myself having a doubt about my verdict.  He talked so softly that I had to cup my ear to hear him..
 "Please don't stop with merely being upset, Jill. "Do something with that feeling of turmoil.  Transform it.  Transcend it.  You're hurting.  You need to be healed.  If you like, I can perform a healing ritual, right here in the woods."
We were near enough to the overhang to hear the rushing of the waters beneath.  "Do you think someone here at the camp is a killer?" I asked.
I watched the iris curtain in his eyes draw closed, until his blue eyes, normally wide with wonderment, became darting dots. "Haven't you heard?  The police are holding that Indian who was always creeping around the place. Rao.  He might not have killed Dawn, but his fingerprints are all over the meditation room where Diana got the ax.  Sorry. Didn't mean to put it so crudely."
We walked in silence for a minute.  The path had narrowed, so that we had to go single file.  He gestured for me to lead the way.  I declined.
"I'll follow the leader," I said.
In a minute more, we reached the clearing.
"What an electrifying view!" I wasn't really near enough to the cliff's edge to appreciate its full grandeur.  
I took a deep breath. "I don't think Rao is the killer. I can't share that belief."
"Whether you can or you can't, the police are satisfied that they've caught their man. That's why the rest of us are getting clearance to leave now."  He reached out to take my hand.  He put his shoulder on the small of my back, then withdrew it like I had burned him. "I feel the energy disturbance inside you.  The currents should be flowing clockwise, but yours are flowing every which way.  You have an energy blockage.  I can help with that."
I sat down on a grassy knoll, still several yards from the bluff's edge.It's harder to push a person who is sitting down. "Everyone up here is a suspect, Alexander.  How do you know that I'm not the killer? How do I know you're not?"
I tried to encourage him to sit beside me but he remained standing, bending over me. "I can see that all this is preying on your mind.  You don't want to carry that kind of baggage back home with you. Of course I don't see you as a suspect!  And what evidence would you have to see me as one?"
I looked up at the sunny, bright, glorious day.  If the Naturalist writers like Zola were right, and outer nature mirrored inner nature, this should not be a day to die. 
"One could build up a case.  You were the first person to reach Dawn when she landed in the water.  Maybe you needed to make sure that she was already dead, so that you wouldn't have to drown her before the healers scooted down the hill. And you were seen walking out of the meditation room during Diana' last watch.  You've been Mr. Johnny-on-the-spot whenever there's been a murder."
He glared at me.  My child abuse tenure had schooled me pretty well in telling when someone's going to launch into a song and dance denial routine.
"I'm sure you've dreamed up a motive to go with your hallucination about seeing me walking from the meditation room."
"I didn't say I was the hallucinator.  But you'll never get me to tell who it was.  And yeah, I can come up with a motive. Dawn and Muriel had just learned about Abel Meyer's Nazi connection. Gabriel told Dawn, Dawn told Muriel -- and Muriel told Anubis that she was pulling out the magic carpet.  Her endowment and will.  When Muriel steps foot off this compound and goes to her lawyer, it'll be all over for the Eyes of Horus."
He bristled.  "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard! Gabriel Spencer is the man you want!" He had for once raised his voice to a normal decibel level.  "He's been prowling around this place ever since we got here. He hid in the woods the first night and scared Diana with that deer's head.  Some people thought that he was using astral projection. They give him too much credit. He's not a good enough magician for that.  He was back here the next day talking to Muriel, his mother.  Gabriel is the killer, with Muriel egging him on every step of the way. That lady knew what she was doing when she professed to have a migraine headache and got Diana Jones to take her night watch.  If she'd truly had a migraine, she would have come to me.  I'm a doctor.  I've developed a treatment that can make any headache dissolve."
He knelt down beside me and tried to massage my forehead.
"It's okay," I said.  "I don't have a headache.  Not yet. You just told me that Rao is the murderer.  Now you tell me it's Gabriel, Muriel's son. And with his mother's approval.  What possible reason could Muriel have had for wanting Diana dead?"
He put two fingers under my chin and raised it to look into his face. I was getting uncomfortable with all this physical touching but did not know what to do about it. "Muriel despised Diana. It was a wonderful hatred to behold. So atavistic. The hatred of the old and ugly for the young and beautiful.!"
I wasn't buying it.  "Muriel isn't ugly. And she has more esoteric knowledge in her thumbnail than Diana had in her whole body. Sorry. I think my own theory is the most logical one.  I think you're the one that wasted them, Doctor!"
Alexander remained crouched over me.  He turned his left hand to expose the large aquamarine stone in his ring.  "You're getting hysterical.  Slow down. Look into the ring, Jill.  Stare at the stone.  Don't say anything else.  Just keep looking at the stone.  It's a very calming stone.  And relax.  Re-lax.  Re-lax."
I tried to fight glancing at the ring, while appearing to do so. I let my eyes slip out of focus.  Yet I found I couldn't help but to do as Alexander directed.  At the same time, I knew that his cool blue eyes, the same color as the stone, were boring through me.  I was experiencing the same sensation that I felt when I floated to the ceiling in Ian's room after the discovery of Diana's body.
His voice was a feather-soft metronome.   He was uttering "Relax, let go.  Let all worries and anxieties evaporate like a dewdrop in the sunshine.  Keep looking at the ring....only the ring....only the ring...."
I had that feeling like you're struggling to awaken from a nightmare, but the dream keeps sucking you back.  I tried to speak, felt the stirring in my throat but no sound came out.  I have had two or three experiences where I've had trouble rousing myself from dreams I'd rather not be in.   The only way I know how to escape is to shake my head, the only part of  the body that isn't paralyzed by R.E.M. sleep.  I tried shaking.  
The disembodied voice was droning on.  "You have now passed beyond the fetters of the human body.  You can do anything.  You are a ray of energy. A merger with the divine.  While your body is resting in the grass, your soul can fly.      
"It can even soar over the edge of the cliff.  All you have to do is trust.  Give it a try.  Let your new energy body glide to the edge...."
I continued shaking my head.  This time my throat did not fail me. I shouted out,  "Did you kill them?  Yes or no?"
"Yes, damn you!  Yes I did!"  He grabbed my arms and started dragging me toward the edge.  "What the hell difference does it make? They both were emotional cripples.  They wouldn't have been able to make any progress in this lifetime.  I have accelerated the evolution of their souls!"
"But you didn't even plan to kill Diana.  You wanted Muriel!" Why was I arguing, I wonder, when I was now a cow being prodded toward the same slaughterhouse?  He had dragged me only about ten feet from the edge.
"They all were ripe for the picking!"
I screamed for help.  Screamed bloody murder.  There was rustling in the bush. 
"Freeze!  Police officers!"
 Inez Sharp and Makepeace jumped into the clearing.  The tall male detective and the dumpy, short female one each had their weapons leveled at Alexander's head.  
Alexander froze.  For that matter, so did I.  Inez Sharp approached Alexander.
  "Dr. Alexander Love?  I charge you with the murders of Dawn Vanderbosch and Diana Jones. "
Makepeace covered while Inez Sharp, wearing a leather jacket and a pair of poorly tailored men's trousers, handcuffed Alexander.
"Hands behind your back!"
"Lay on the ground!"
I took one final peep at the aquamarine ring.
"You are entitled to a lawyer," Makepeace said.
"Anything that you say can be used against you," recited Inez Sharp.
The female detective gave me a spiteful glance.  "Your boyfriend Ian convinced us that we needed to hide out here. He told us that something would be coming down. I went on record as saying it would be a wild goose chase.    Damn good thing for you it wasn't!  I'm not going to accept any more cases of groups like this.  You people are too crazy.  I only want drug dealers from now on."
"I've enjoyed working with you too, Detective Sharp," I said.
"Watch out!"
In a flash, Alexander, handcuffs and all, had turned his body into a rolling pin.  The pin was headed toward the overhang.
"Stop him!
Makepeace tried to grab the sideways rolling top. Too late. Alexander had thrust himself over the edge. I heard him scream, I heard a splatter.  A body broken beyond repair lay in the water a hundred feet below.

Chapter twenty-three

  The sun had nearly completed its descent, leaving that distinct reddish haze that marks the period between sunset and the gradual fall of darkness.  It is the type of lighting that often occurs in dreams. I cannot remember ever having had a dream that took place in the blaze of a noon sun.  The action in my dreams usually occurs at dusk I find myself walking along an unfamiliar city sidewalk.  An eerie darkness encircles the street lamps.  In the dreams, I never get to my destination.
  I moved through the garden, headed back to the monastery. Rao, his flowing white shirt contrasting with his red-brown skin, cut through the tomato plants with a basket full of vegetables. I waved without slackening my pace.  He looked like he had a story to tell but I lacked the heart to hear it.   The ritual would begin at dark
  I slipped into my room. The last thing I wanted was to get to the chapel  early and risk having to stand around making small talk.  I sat on my bed, checked my watch and waited. My overstuffed canvas travel bag was a comforting sight. The first thing tomorrow morning I would pick it up, fling it into Ian's car and we'd be off.  We were free to leave now if we wanted to.  All of the silent meditators had cleared out.  I wasn't sure, but I think the Enneagram people had disappeared too.  I had spied Peg Woodward carrying a suitcase to her car a couple of hours ago  She  looked forever changed. 
  So were we all. Three deaths, and for what?  I reviewed the events in my mind as if I had been called on to tell the story. I thought of my couple of girlfriends in the outside world asking for a recounting of what had happened at Pilgrim Farm. The words which I spoke soundlessly didn't come close to adding up to anything that made sense.  I felt the tears well up, flood my eyes, bathe my cheeks.  I went into the bathroom and dashed a handful of water in the direction of my face.  Feeling that I had undergone a twisted and perverse baptism, I made my way toward the chapel.
  It seemed a little bit crazy to go ahead with the ritual considering all that had gone down.  But "closure" is the buzzword these days and it was the consensus that we had to have it.
  I walked into the dimly lit room.  One ornate electric lamp, suspended from the ceiling like a tabernacle, boosted the light of a dozen candles. Incense smoke streamed upward from brass burners.  The figures of my classmates, in various degrees of ritual dress, flickered back and forth in the shadows.  
  In her rich black velvet robe, Muriel Baxter looked ever bit like the High Priestess she was. She wore the headpiece of Isis, a lunar disk propped up by the horns of a cow.  I knew that Muriel's grabbing the premiere female role would leave Holly Summerfield to eat her heart out.
  Holly' robe was home sewn, a crude cotton.  Her sewing skills were about as good as my own, when I still tried to sew. I recollected a few battles with dipping hems and sleeves sewn shut.  In her hand, Holly  was holding a paper papier-mache cat's head.  She would be the goddess Bast. 
  In a cruel parody of a casting decision, slow-witted Henry Peacock was in the process of becoming Thoth, the god of learning, wisdom,  and magic. Henry looked slightly dazed as he tried on the ibis head for size.  A fidgety Victor Stone was recognizable as Horus.
   Anubis was of course Anubis the jackal-headed god who took the souls of the dead to be weighed.  If the real Egyptian god had descended on Pilgrim Farm this week, he sure would have his work cut out for him. Anubis the man sat hunched in his chair, head bowed, face hidden behind his hands. Perhaps he was seeing visions from afar. He certainly wasn't present in the room in any other than a physical sense.
  I stared hard, trying to get my eyes accustomed to the dim lighting.  My heartbeat began to approach tachycardia. Ian was nowhere in the room!  Over-anxious case study that he was, Ian was the last person I knew to pop in late for something of this magnitude.  I revisited the image of Diana Jones' bloody corpse in the meditation room.  Her hacked body turned into Ian's.
   Then I noticed the coffin.  It lay in in the darkest crevice of the room, a few feet behind Anubis' chair. An unrecognizable figure lay in the coffin,  bound with strips of sheets from head to foot.  The form was that of a tall, pudgy man.  Ian weighed too much be the ideal Osiris, but he had  won the starring role.  He must have been Alexander Love's understudy.
  Anubis suddenly rose from his chair and made a gesture like a maestro raising his baton to conduct a symphony orchestra.  As if by magic, the entire group was transformed.  Costumes were readied. Lines were formed. The Triumphal March from Aida blasted out from the battered boom box.
  Victor, Henry and two other men picked up the coffin  containing Ian and paraded it around the room .  They came to rest in the middle of the chapel.  Grimacing with physical strain, they set the coffin down.
  Anubis rose to greet the procession.  His body showed more animation than it had shown all week. His face was disguised by the jackal mask. From somewhere within his flowing robe, he pulled out a silvery dagger. Walking in a catlike crouch, the dagger held high, he circled the room clockwise. He chanted in a language that I did not understand. 
  "I call on Raphael!  Guardian of the East! "  Anubis' voice could have been a cry from another world.  The voice had reverted to a German accent.
   A young woman named Sandra shyly stepped forth. Her voice was a sliver.   Not a voice to carry the conviction of an archangel charged with the task of standing guard over a whole quarter.  
  "I am the Guardian of the East.  The element is air.  I am the keeper of the Wand. My gift is incense."  Sandra stepped slightly forward, held up a lighted joss stick, and retreated to her former stance against the Eastern wall.
  "I call on Michael!  Guardian of the South!"  So commanding was the voice that the archangel himself wouldn't have had the nerve to refuse to come.
   A man of fifty, a group member whom I'd never heard speak in class, stepped from the South wall. I nearly convulsed in laughter when I heard him talk.  All I needed was to ruin the ritual with a school girl's giggling fit.  The man had an incredibly deep southern accent. "Ah em the Guardian of the South. .   Ah em the keeper of the sword.  Ma element is fire which I offer as ma gift."
  "I call on Gabriel!"  Venom had invaded Anubis' voice.  I could easily believe that he was shouting to another Gabriel. He finally added, "Archangel an dem Westen!"  
 German spoken at last! 
 This was my own curtain call. I stepped forward. I tried to denude my voice of any shade of a Baltimore accent.  "I am the Archangel of the West.  The element is water.  I am the keeper of the cup.  Water is the gift that I bring."  My extended arm held a chalice filled with water. I dipped my hand in the chalice and sprinkled with my fingers.
  "I call upon Uriel!  Archangel of the North!"  The voice was even more alien, more insistent.  Since my own speaking part was over, I let my mind wander.  I could feel a strong energy field in the room.  It was like the feeling you can get if you're wearing wool and put your hand half an inch before a television screen.
  Anubis and Muriel as Isis stepped up to the coffin where Ian lay.
  "What does the Goddess seek?" Anubis asked.
  Muriel's voice would have done credit to any screen actress.  "I the Goddess Isis rise with the moon from the sea. Osiris is dead, murdered by his brother Set.  I seek the restoration of his life."
  "I must first weigh the Soul." Anubis hovered over Osiris-Ian's mummy wrapped body.  
  "I find the Soul to be heavy with sin!  The state of the Soul must first be assessed, so that the decision can be made.  The underworld must not be denied."  Anubis' voice raged from beneath the mask
  The others took the role of assessors. They encircled Osiris. I was thinking of him as Osiris rather than as Ian at this point. Everyone began firing questions at the prone figure.  The trouble was, these were real-life questions and the subject was supposed to supply honest answers.
  "Osiris, do you love your mother?"
   Dead silence from the coffin.
   "You must answer all questions truthfully," Anubis scolded.
   "I love her," Ian's voice said.  "But I don't always like her."
   "Do you ever tell lies?" This from Victor Stone.
   "Yes."
   The liar's paradox came to my mind: a person who never told the truth and admitted it might, for once, be telling the truth.  
   "Have you ever stolen anything?"  Holly demanded.
   "Yes."
   "What did you steal?" from Henry Peacock.
   "Uh--  computer software.  I have a trick floppy disk, you see..."
     Anubis roared.  "Man, you are at the gate of judgment!  The time for explanations is past.  Confine your answers to the questions so that we can get the true state of your soul."
    "Have you ever used illegal drugs?" Holly pressed on.
    The nerve of that woman, I thought. 
    Ian's  voice sounded muffled beneath the rags. "Only a couple of times.  A long time ago. I was a lot younger."
    "He's trying to influence the answer again," Holly complained.
    "I caution you once more," said Anubis.  "Antworten Sie mir!"
    I was beginning to feel scared.  I had no idea where this was all leading. No one seemed satisfied with Ian's answers.  Perhaps the group was planning on harming him in some way. Bound head to foot, he was scarcely in a position to fight back.
  "Are you a peaceful man?"  Muriel asked.
  "I consider myself to be."
  "Do you approach your fellow men and women with love?"  Muriel continued.
  "Yes."
  "Do you try to treat others as you would like to be treated?"
  "You can't do that!" Holly barked.  "You're taking over the whole thing!"
  "Did you have a question, Goddess Bast?" Anubis asked.
  Holly pressed closer to the coffin.  "Did you ever hate anyone?" 
  "No."
  "Oh, come on!  Don't tell me you never hated anyone in your life!" 
"Goddess Bast!  The question has been answered. You must not press." said Anubis.
  The tautness in my chest loosened slightly.  Anubis sounded placated.Still, I wondered which way the scales would tilt.
  Henry Peacock asked, "Ah--do you like cats? Or dogs?"
  "Isn't that like having to choose between Verdi and Wagner?"
  Ian is one of those opera fans who raves about both of those great composers. I can stand neither but I put that down to ignorance. 
Someone tittered. The ritual was fast losing the energy that was its glue. Anubis perceptively intervened.
  "Dearest fraters and sorors, it is now time for our guided meditation. We must of course meditate on the life of our slain Osiris and reach our verdict as to whether the false outweighs the true. But more important!  We must light lamps on the astral plane so that  Dawn, Diana and Alexander can find their way as their souls climb up the Tree of Life.  By your concentration and your magical will, they shall be raised directly up the middle pillar of the tree, from the dense matter of Malkuth, through Yesod, right up to Tiphareth, the Christ Center, whose symbol is the Sacrificed God.  
 "Quickly get into your meditation positions.  Sitting back in your chairs.  Begin your deep breathing.  Reign in your senses.  Listen only to the beat of your heart...."
  With the room already heavily dimmed, someone clicked off the remaining electric lamp.  The flickering candles did little to illuminate.  They only lengthened the shadows.  
   The music was a monotonous low guttural chant.  It had as much intonation as a computerized voice. I think the words of the chant were "up-the-middle-pillar-RISE-the souls-of-the-departed."  I  could hear a half dozen distinct chanters.  The Eyes of Horus must have recorded the tape themselves.
   "And now you are relaxed.  Let your minds go blank. See yourself as standing on Malkuth, the plane of manifest existence.   You are, my fraters and sorors, holding three lamps.  Reach into your hearts,  wherein your gods dwell. ...and there you will find a spark.....the spark that is the gods and goddesses working within....use that spark to light your lamps..."
  The background chant played on Anubis' voice like a low-pitched instrument with just one string.  The combined affect quickly brought on an altered state.  I was aware that my body was in the room, was aware that Ian lay in the coffin.   Smoke from frankincense lulled my unsettled mind.  
   "...And now, hold your lighted lamps high over your heads...see yourselves standing on tiptoe...and you can just about begin to notice a violet glow...mixed with the moonlight...for you are standing between the worlds...you are ready... to enter the astral plane........take this time to walk through and explore the astral by yourselves...always remembering..that it is not a physical location...but rather, a state of consciousness...
  "You want to plant your lamps in this sphere...as guideposts for our three fallen friends.  Please pay particular attention.....that the lamp you leave for Alexander...shines extra bright...and will not be missed by him.  I will stop talking for a few minutes so that you can position your lamps."
  I imagined myself hanging the lamps. I moved within the sphere of the moon, envisioning the silver crescent of a cold December night.  It was the kind of moon I had always imagined that the cow jumped over.  The crescent was huge, with its lowest edge almost touching the earth.  I hung the lamps for Dawn and Diana on the edge of that low crescent.    
  In my mind's eye I came to a violet-tinged clearing containing nine golden cups. I placed my lamp for Alexander near these cups.            I waited for Anubis to bid us to travel further up the Tree of Life.
  "And now we cast our eyes above...right up the Middle Pillar...and we reach a place of beauty, a sphere of the harmony of the universe.   Please stop here and answer this question:  what would a harmonious universe be like for you?"
  I don't know how long I pondered this question.  Everything had gotten very quiet. I could hear the Westminster chimes ring out from the Grandfather clock all the way down by the library.  It was nine-thirty.  Sitting there in the semi-darkness I took several additional deep breaths and tried to meditate on the harmony of the universe But my concentration had deserted me.  Holly had a squeaky cushion on her chair.  Victor needed to clear his throat.  I thought of poor Ian, lying there in the mummy's wrap.  I wondered if anyone had to go to the bathroom.
  Anubis must have wanted us to do a lot of pondering on the harmony of the universe because he showed no sign that he was ready to resume the meditation.
The chimes bonged again.  Quarter to ten.  The tape had long ceased playing.
I heard Holly whisper, "this is ridiculous!"  I could hear Victor trying to hush her.
 I opened my eyes and again looked across the darkened room, waiting for my vision to accommodate. Many of the group still assumed a meditative posture.  Holly and Henry had their eyes open and were gesturing to get each other's attention.
 I closed my eyes once more and tried to return to the meditation. There was nothing doing.  Now it was not only the grandfather clock, it was also my Cascio that gave its hourly chirps.  At least two other watches in the room followed. Ten o'clock.  Maybe the ritual wasn't scheduled to end until midnight.
  People were whispering.
  "Is he going on?"
  "Do we dare...."
   Finally, the silken tone of Muriel Baxter interrupted the silence. She was the only one that could pull it off without affront. "Anubis, shall we continue?"
   I paid silent homage to her confidence.  It is the type of confidence more readily found in a person who is born wealthy and cherished than in one who is not. I was beginning to think that our leader had fallen asleep.  I have seen judges fall asleep on court benches....
   There was no response. Perhaps Anubis had wandered too far out onto the astral, and needed to be gently returned to the room.
   "I think," I said, "that we should turn on the light."
    Muriel was the one who found her way to the switch for the overhead light.  It was a dimmer switch. The chapel became gradually brighter.
     Finally, in the shadows, I saw him.  Anubis; Abel Meyer; whoever or whatever else he had been, sat slumped in his chair. His hands were crossed over his chest.  His mouth was agape. His eyes, though half opened, would see no more.