They ringed the fire, starting with a single man, slender and old with slate gray hair and bright eyes that caught the firelight and flung it to the sky. From his side they extended in a single, unbroken line, spiraling out from the center. They filled the clearing and threaded themselves through the trees when all of the open space had been filled.
The one who had called them was nowhere to be seen, yet they swayed to the power of his voice. It crackled in the snap of branches, consumed in flames, and hissed as a brood of vipers rushing through the scant leaves of the trees over their heads. They did not touch one another. They did not speak. The air had grown heavy, not with the moisture of a rainstorm, but with a cloying, musky odor that permeated their clothing, slicked their skin and hair with sweat, and drew them into a single, undulating whole.
Their voices joined, first the old man nearest the fire, and then each of the others in succession, strengthening the unified wave of sound until it was dragged from its place on the breeze and ripped from the earth beneath their feet. The human spiral began to move.
Unlike their voices, this motion rolled from the outside in. The furthest from the flame stepped toward the next in line and they rippled, a human domino chain of energy that picked up speed slowly. The precision of it was uncanny; legs flashed beside legs, steps increased in speed, long strides and short, blended in a macabre dance. Seen from above they formed a serpent, uncoiling slowly and flexing its strength.
As the surge broke through the center rings, faster and faster, the coils tightened. At the end of it all, the old man with the gray hair and flashing eyes spun with the grace of a dancer. He flung his arms out and up. He closed his eyes and drew his legs together, poised. Though there was no wind, his hair lifted up and back from the flames. The chant, so subtle moments before, rose to a roar, rushed at him from behind and drew from the fire at the same time, a vortex of sound. He lifted until only the tips of his toes held his precarious balance on the surface of the clearing. Then the wave hit.
The others in the line didn't touch him, but he was lifted. He soared about six feet straight into the air and arched into the bonfire. Hot tongues of flame licked at him, even in flight, and his gray hair burst into a fiery halo that left a trail of sparks as he plummeted into the searing heat and the dancing, snapping flames. A collective sigh rolled back along the line and became a loud, hissing moan.
There were no screams of pain. There was no scent of burning flesh, nor any sign that the man had ever existed. The fire began, very slowly, to pull back in on itself. It was not possible to see it in the darkness, eyes blinded by sweat and brilliant flame, but as it died down its death followed a spiral pattern, mirroring that of the line of men, women, and children who swayed before it, catching speed as they had caught speed. It drew into the Earth at a single point, whipped faster and faster, round and round itself with such dazzling speed that it only appeared to flicker and gutter, caught in the same non-extant wind that had lifted the old man's hair from his head and his feet from the ground. It slid down to oblivion like a serpent entering its lair, and when it was done, he was there.
Tall shadows fell across their faces, but their blind eyes saw nothing. With the fire so suddenly gone, the moon re-asserted her control of the night. The light was too dim, too soft and silver, and the shadows snaked about them like writhing snakes. They stood very still, and as their eyes adjusted, the shadows took a new form.
Long, slender branches with pointed tips shot out at crazed angles from the two points where they joined his scalp. The antlers were ponderous, heavier than the largest ten-point buck could carry, thick and knobbed, ropy and twisted. He turned, very slowly, and that shadow wound its way in and around them until it fell across their pale, upturned faces. His eyes glittered like cut gems, glowing a brilliant flame yellow, even in the moonlight. He stood only about five foot eleven, but in that moment he loomed huge and imposing, the twisted shadow of antlers crisscrossing the air above his head like a crown of thorns.
They moved with him. Even as the sight that met their eyes registered on those gathered, they swayed, undulating in time, coiling and uncoiling. He was the horned serpent head and they his captured, scaled body, held in thrall by the force of his gaze and the hypnotic swaying motion of his shadow-crowned form.
He bent down to the ground at his feet, where the fire had crackled and danced so recently, and the motion swept the great shadow-antlers back through them without warning. Where the darkness met flesh, energy crackled, but there were no cries. Those who were touched would bear the scars to their graves, but in that instant they were parts of a single whole, and what they felt spread along the length of the chain and back to its head without a whimper.
He held one hand out before him. His forefinger was coated in dark, powdered ash. Without hesitation he stepped to the first in line behind him and drew that finger across the skin of a forehead. The symbol was smudged, but clear, obscure and intensely precise. The smudged, primitive image of the black body of a serpent wound its way up the forehead of a young girl, and her eyes went wide.
She toppled backward and crashed into the man behind her; he screamed suddenly and fell into an old woman with sand-gray hair and a hawk's nose. She had no time to join her voice to theirs before she fell against the man behind her, but moments later she found both voice and heart for it. What had been a coordinated unit joined in motion and grace dissolved to a chaos of sound, screaming voices and high pitched keening. Where bodies had moved in harmony, close as blades of grass but never touching, a confusion of limbs and motion erupted.
Up until that moment, things had progressed in slow fluidity, one motion leading the next. It had been choreographed to the sound of his voice and the flickering dance of the fire. Now it crumbled. Men ran in all directions, screamed, crashed into trees and trampled those before and behind them, the strong escaping and the weaker falling, or limping, some even crawling to escape that clearing and to get out from beneath the shadow of those huge, ebon antlers. Without the light of the fire to guide them, they ran blindly. Some found the path by luck; others ran deeper into the woods and hills. Children cried out for their parents and were ignored. From where the old man stood, his finger still poised in the air where it had left its mark on the smooth flesh of the girl's forehead, the clearing looked like a panoramic diorama of Hell, complete with tortured souls and a stereo soundtrack. He watched them stumble and crawl over one another until the last of them, even the tiniest child, had disappeared from sight, and then he watched a bit longer.
He had entered the woods as Silas Greene, but now? He didn't know if the name had meaning any longer. He felt the weight press down on him from above, but his hand passed easily over his head. Nothing. He knew what was there—they all felt it—but on this plane, in this form, everything shifted.
Then he turned his hand and stared at the black ashes smudged on the tip of his finger.
"I'll be damned," he said.
Then he began to chuckle. It was a deep-throated sound, louder and richer than could be expected to emanate from a human throat, particularly that of an old man. The ground shook, and he knew the sound would carry to them, and that they would redouble their efforts to escape. He wondered briefly how many would be lost in the woods come morning, and how many others would be brave enough to enter and search them out. He wondered if they would come back to the ashes of the fire, or spend their day trying to cleanse his mark from their brows.
They wore it. Everyone who had been touched in that tangle of bodies had been marked as surely as the one he'd touched directly. Others would see the mark in the light, and they would know. They would turn their faces from one another in shame and anger, but they would know. Those who had not been in the woods would know, as well, if they had not already guessed.
He threw back his head and the chuckle became a full-blown laugh. The sound echoed across the hills like thunder. Then, with purposeful strides, the man formerly known as Silas Greene turned and strode thr
ough the forest toward hearth and home. There was a great deal to accomplish, and little time.
In her cottage at the edge of the trees, Sarah shivered in her sleep.
TWO
Silas Greene stared up at the old church in satisfaction. The walls were coated in a sort of green slime of mildew and moss. The forest encroached at its foundations; roots bit deep into masonry and brick and vines ate at wood siding and paint, but the building was sound. They would have to paint, replace the glazing on the windows that remained and repair the glass on the rest. The door was warped and swung off of one hinge, but it could be repaired and hung properly. The roof needed work, and the interior of the building had an abandoned, rank scent—half animal musk and the other half rotted vegetation. The pews stood as they had always stood, though now they were covered in dust. A couple of them showed the mark of termites. These would have to be removed carefully. Silas wasn't worried about the vermin. Men, insects, and rodents were equally simple to contain and control, once you knew their secrets. He stepped up to the door, pushed it wide, and entered. He was greeted by the flapping of startled wings. Something dislodged from the ceiling and fell in a trickle of dust to land behind the pulpit. Silas swept his gaze up and down the walls and took in the signature the years had etched across them. The church had never been magnificent. It came closer, in fact, to magnificence in its decay than it had ever aspired to in its glory. Once brilliant fluorescent lamps had illuminated the altar, while the muted golden light of wall sconces stretched back past the pews. Rich curtains of deep purple had run floor to ceiling behind the pulpit, covering the baptismal pool and the rest from sight until it was needed, and providing the perfect backdrop to the spot lit stage of the Lord.
He turned slowly and looked up above the frame of the door through which he'd entered. There was a small alcove just over the center, and in that he could just make out two eyes, glaring at him from the shadow. Hair roped out in strands from the sides of a narrow, elongated face. Leaves were woven in and out of those strands, carved of the wood of some ancient tree in a place and time so far removed from the mountain, and that church, that their history was lost.
The carved head should have stood out, stark and wrong against the flat, even boards of the church, but it did not. Instead, the roping, vine hair stretched to the sides and into the shadows. The glare of the eyes was intense, and if you returned that stare, even for a moment, you got the impression that, rather than the head being added to the church, the church had grown out from the wood of the strands, that it all centered back on that one small square shelf and the rest of it was nothing but the trappings of her court.
Silas tore his gaze away, and smiled. As he moved, just for an instant, the dark shadow of antlers passed across the wooden floor and up the back of the rear pew. He caught the motion from the corner of his eye and his smile widened perceptibly.
Turning from the woman above the door, Silas felt as if she embraced him, as if the church itself embraced him, extending out in waves from her twining, ropy root hair. The walls wound around to the tattered remnant of the curtains, and beyond them he saw the concrete and tile of the pool. Plants grew there, green plants with roots and brown limbs, not the solid wood of the woman's hair, but the earth, probing inward and trying to reclaim what had been stolen. The stone and the wood, the tile and the water—was there still water? Was it possible? Was it blessed, and if so, by whom?
Silas strode down the center aisle, ignoring the piles of moldy hymnals and the scattered papers, crushing the folding paper fans with stained-glass images and fair-haired Anglo-Saxon Christs, blue-eyed and smiling beneficently as they walked on water and healed the lame. As the children gathered at their feet. As demons fled into the swine.
Something sloshed in the water, slid over the side of the pool, and was gone in a sinuous roll across the wooden floor and out the rear door of the building. Silas ignored it. As he neared the altar the dark energy that had filled him so completely since the bonfire in the woods awoke. His senses expanded. He was aware of the scent of the water in the rotted pool, felt the pulse of the creatures that rested within, and around him. He felt that other; her eyes bored through the back of his skull and pressed him onward. He felt more acutely the embrace of the arms that extended from beneath that carved head through the medium of walls and windows, floor and patched roof. The building was alive, and the deeper he entered into that life, the more a part of it he became, and the less a part of all he had left behind.
Silas Greene had a life. At least, the man who had been Silas Greene had one. There was a small store at the fork of the mountain paths leading down the far side. One path wound up to Friendly, California and the other down toward San Valencez and the ocean beyond. Above the door of that store hung a sign proclaiming it to be "Greene's General Store." Folks went there for things they were too lazy, or in too much of a hurry to fetch from 'outside.' You could buy foodstuff, books, paper and pens, canning supplies. Silas kept "a little of everything and a lot of nothing," as he was fond of proclaiming.
No one had seen that door open since Silas had filed into the wood, along with the rest of them almost a week before. No one had seen a light in his house, or smoke rising from his chimney. In point of fact, no one had seen Silas Greene at all since that night—not since he'd lowered his head and swept those great black shadow antlers through them, scattering them like leaves in the wind. Most folks had a vague notion that it had been Silas, but they couldn't quite credit it in their daytime minds. They knew Silas.
They knew nothing. Silas knew them, though, and he had an idea that this would make all the difference. He found, in fact, as he stepped closer to the stagnant pool that had once washed away the sins of the "true believers" and girded them in the white-light armor of their Lord, that he knew more of them than he had before. He knew their names, their faces, their lives and loves. He knew each one he had touched, and by peripheral contact all of those who had, in turn, been touched.
He felt them, heard their thoughts as if whispered just out of reach. He had made his mark on that girl, and she had spread it like a virus, infecting their minds with the touch of his mind. They clung to the marks he had given them selfishly, hid them in shame by the light of day and caressed them alone in the darkness.
They had dreams. All men have dreams. Those dreams were awakened by his presence and promised in the great sweep of darkness that hovered above and just beyond him. Silas could bring them their dreams. Silas would bring them their dreams. All they had to do was to follow him. All they had to do was throw themselves at his feet and grovel. All they had to do was to turn off the light of their personal choice and set that choice on the altar, and he would take them in.
But Silas wasn't ready. It wasn't yet time. There was a great deal of work to be done, and he was going to need a few of them to assist him in beginning that work. The temptation was strong to call them all to him at once and attack the old church in a frenzied flurry of rebirth and power, but that temptation was born of Silas Greene, and not of the thing that had inhabited his mind and soul. He still walked and talked with Greene's voice, but he was more—and less—than he had once been, and while Silas himself was greedy and without patience, the other was not.
Nor was she who watched him, bound as she was to the roots and stone of the mountain, part and parcel to the church building and all it had stood for—and would again. She had waited and watched over the barren pews and the broken windows. She had sung her quiet songs to the creatures that slithered through the depths of the baptismal pool and watched the sunsets drip red down the walls through a lens of stained glass. She had seen the horned one arise, and fall, the only power to rival and mesh with her own within her range. Now he had risen again, and she would watch and blend with him—strengthen him—and then? Well, first things first.
Silas stood with his hands planted on the edge of the old baptismal pool and gazed into its depths. They were as he remembered—as the man Silas Greene remembere
d. Sinuous bodies rolled over and around one another and formed arcane patterns. Their triangular heads and flitting tongues darted this way and that, swayed in the air, and all of those glittering, emotionless eyes watched him in return.
It was mesmerizing. There was a crack in the side of the tank, a break in the perfect symmetry of the tiled interior. They could have escaped at any time—no doubt had escaped, time and again, but they had returned. A quick glance around the alcove showed that the glass tanks had been shattered. Their shards and glittering bits lay in moss-encrusted clumps strewn about the floor. But the baptismal pool had drained, and they had found their way inside.
They had waited. Perhaps she had called and held them—Silas didn't know, but he remembered. He'd seen these snakes, or their ancestors, before. The images hung like tapestries in the back of his mind, blocking off parts of himself that might have blossomed into something more than a small time shopkeeper on a remote mountain—parts of him that might have found a woman, fallen in love, or even made friends. All of that was lost to him, but the memory was not.
"Hallelujah!" He whispered to himself. The word slid in among the snakes and drew him into his past.
The Greene's wound their way slowly through the trees toward the church, one family among many. They greeted those they passed, but did not linger to gossip. Sundays were not their time, but the Lord's, and Reverend Kotz was waiting for them. No one wanted to be the first through the doors of the church, but worse still was to arrive late.
Silas clung to his mother's coat and hurried his steps to keep up with the adults. His cheeks burned whenever they passed one of his schoolmates, because he didn't want them to see him clinging to his parents in this way, but the truth was that Silas was frightened of the church. There was something about the way its white painted walls gleamed in the morning sunlight that was false, like one of the older women with makeup caked all over her face to hide which side of fifty she was. Reverend Kotz was worse.
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