A Darker Place Read Online Free Page B

resign formally, simply walking away from his desk and his ongoing projects, to the confusion and indignation of his former employers—and sold their cars and furniture, and left.
    In India, they met a young Canadian named Samantha Dooley, who had dropped out of her sophomore year at Harvard at the age of seventeen and a half and gone to live responsibly on the earth on a commune near Pune, where she was quietly starving, when she met the three travelers. The four Westerners joined up, moved on to Bombay for a while, and eventually worked their way back to Fairweather’s native England, where they used his considerable inheritance to buy a run-down estate. There they established a doctrine and a community called Change, which attracted a growing number of followers over the years. Steven and Jonas changed theirnames, Fairweather becoming Jonas Seraph, although Mallory and Samantha Dooley retained theirs.
    Eight years after returning from India, the original four divided: Steven and Mallory to concentrate on their new site in Arizona, which drew heavily from the San Francisco and Los Angeles branches, while Jonas and Samantha Dooley continued their efforts in rural England. Both enterprises flourished, and although the San Francisco branch was being shut down, there were still smaller branches in Boston, Los Angeles, southern France, Germany, and two in Japan. There were now nearly eight hundred members.
    On the surface, there seemed little to draw the attention of Glen McCarthy’s project to Change. One of the things working against a possible diagnosis of coming disaster was the far-flung nature of this particular group. Most problematic communal entities—the kinds of groups that were dubbed “cults” by the media and which tended to flash into an orgy of violence, either self-directed or against a perceived enemy—were close-knit, closemouthed little communities obsessively focused on one individual, a person whose irrationality and fears were in turn nourished by the attentions of his (or occasionally her) followers. In this case, although each branch had its leader, they were scattered. Members of the different groups were constantly in and out—Steven to England, the Japanese leaders to Arizona, families and kids moving from one house to another—not characteristic behavior from threatened communities.
    Another interesting oddity was the Arizona branch. Within months of its founding it had begun a school, a large portion of its students being kids who had been thrown out of other schools, were on parole, or had been remanded from one of the state’s youth facilities. “Troubled youth,” formerly called delinquents, were an odd choice for a religious community, but well establishedwithin Change: All three men of the original leaders had brushed up against the law in some way, Steven as part of a high school drunken spree with several friends (so much for sealed juvenile records, Anne noted disapprovingly) and Jonas Fairweather in England for a series of nuisance crimes that boiled down to ignoring rules rather than deliberately flouting them. Thomas Mallory had the most serious history, having spent six months in jail at the age of nineteen for threatening a neighbor with a gun and blowing holes in the man’s television set. This was during university finals week, and although it marked the end of Mallory’s university career, Anne could feel a twinge of sympathy for the man’s desperate action. Mallory had also been fingered as instrumental in an investigation into illegal arms possession and sales in the Los Angeles branch of Change three years before, where he had gone to assume an apparently temporary leadership for a couple of months, but charges against him were dropped for lack of evidence. Beyond the three of them, the Change leader in Boston had a record as well, for drunk driving and drunk-and-disorderly, and one of the Japanese leaders had a history of “political crimes,” whatever that might