Abe held her for a while, letting the sun bake them both. She smelled his sweat and felt the strength of his arms and the sudden fear melted away. Finally she squirmed free.
Abe stepped onto the porch without a word and flipped through the mail. As usual, he tossed the payments aside first, unopened. He held the other two in his hand. Any other day, whatever else had arrived would take a back seat to the ever-important correspondence from New Jersey, but the sight of the small, yellowed envelope and its odd seal had brought him up short. Very gently, he placed the letter from his agent on the table and then stood silently and stared at the yellow envelope with a frown creasing his brow.
When he glanced up he saw that she'd been holding her breath and watching him watch the envelope. Abe shook his head and stepped back off the porch and into the light.
"What is it?" she asked.
He started to answer, stopped, glanced down at the envelope again, and then shook his head. "I don't know. It's from back home, but there's something …"
He seemed unable to finish the thought, so she did it for him. "Wrong. There's something wrong with it, Abe. I felt it too." He shook his head again, almost angrily, and yanked the flap of the envelope open. He drew out a small piece of paper and read it quickly. His face flushed, and his hand trembled. Kat saw that there was something large and dark at the bottom of the note, but she couldn't make out the words.
"What is it?" she repeated.
At first she thought he wouldn't tell her. He gripped the note so tightly his knuckles went white, and his arm shook. Then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and simply held the note out to her.
She hesitated, but only for a second. Stepping forward, she slipped the paper out of his hand and read quickly. It was written in neat, simple script. Very short.
"He's back, boy. Come home."
There was no signature. At the bottom of the page was a hideous black squiggle, surrounded by the solid lines of an equal-armed cross. Katrina gasped, stepped forward, and before Abe could pull back, she gripped the leather thong around his neck and slid the medallion from beneath his shirt. It glistened in the sunlight, wet with perspiration and warm to the touch.
Kat held the paper alongside it. The design was the same without the dark swirling mark beneath. She twisted her hand into the thong and pulled it tight, nearly choking him.
"What is it?" she asked. Her voice was tight now, fierce.
Abe gently broke free and tugged her hand from the medallion. He held her hand and then stared off over her shoulder for what seemed an eternity, gazing toward the mountains in the east. Then he spoke softly.
"It's from my mother," he said. "It's the first thing I've heard from her since I left the mountain."
Kat shivered. She wasn't sure if it was still the letter working its odd, discomforting spell, or the way he'd said "the mountain," making it somehow a place much further away than the miles she knew it to be. Worlds and centuries distant.
"Who is back?" she asked. "What does it mean?"
He shook his head. "It doesn't matter," he said. He took the paper from her hand and crumpled it with such sudden violence that Kat stepped back and cried out. He didn't glance up at her, but continued to stare at the paper twisted on the ground and catching in the same breeze that had blown the sand around Kat's ankles earlier. It slapped against the leg of his jeans and held.
He trembled, but did not move, and Kat saw a single tear squeeze free of the corner of his eye, sliding down his cheek and blending with the sweat from his run in the morning sun.
"It doesn't matter," he repeated. "I'll never go back."
He put his arm around her back, grabbed the rest of the mail, and led her back inside. The sun had given way to clouds, and it looked like there would be a short squall before noon. It matched his mood perfectly.
SIX
The dream took Abraham the moment he was asleep. He soared far above the land and watched his shadow ripple across the ground beneath him, cast by the silver luminescence of the moon. Cold wind rippled through his hair and his clothing flapped about his arms and legs wildly. It was more sensation than he was accustomed to in a dream, but he lost little thought on this oddity.
He saw the mountain ahead and banked against the backdrop of clouds. On one level he knew it was a dream, a familiar dream, the freedom of flight against a backdrop of darkness that threatened to enfold him at any moment and deny any return to the ground, or to the light. He was certain that Freud or any number of modern philosophers and psychologists would have a field day with the symbols.
Lights flickered on the mountain's side, and he was no longer himself, but had taken on the form of a great bird. He swooped in low and came to rest in the branches of a tall oak. Below, the white church stood. Its windows were ablaze with light. Smoke curled from the chimney and dark shadows moved about inside. He heard sounds from within, but they made no sense to him.
The image of the great stone face from his previous dream returned to him and he cocked his head, concentrating. The surface of the church rippled oddly and faded to translucence. Within its walls he saw long trailing roots and strong ropes of vine binding the wood, running through its core like the veins through the flesh of some great corporeal being, seeking the earth and stone beneath.
The entire structure was woven into a menacing, writhing mass that concentrated just above the main entrance.
As he sat, perched easily on a high branch and hidden in shadows, the universe shifted. The motion and turmoil below ceased, then refocused and bent its will toward him. The structure shuddered under the sudden shift, and the mountain itself rolled to the side, like the shrug of huge shoulders.
Abraham backed along the limb toward the trunk of the tree and shivered with sudden apprehension. He did not want those dark eyes to find him again, not here, and not as he hid in the branches and sneaked about like a spy.
With a frantic whirl he leapt from the branch, flapped his wings, and turned around the far side of the tree to keep it between him and the church. He heard something cry out, and he flapped harder, and then harder still. His muscles strained with the effort.
Then the sound below him shifted tone and timber and became a great bell, ringing over and over, and something gripped him by his shoulders, talons taking him from above. He cried out sharply, and woke with a start, bathed in sweat.
The phone was ringing. He heard a voice calling his name. Hands gripped his shoulders and before he could control it, he gripped the wrists tightly. His mind cleared fully when he heard Katrina gasp in pain and realized it was her voice that he heard. The phone was still ringing.
"You're hurting me, Abe," Katrina jerked backward, and he released her. She pulled back and away to her own side of the bed. The lamp on her side was lit, and as he sat up slowly, leaned on the headboard and shaded his eyes from the light he saw her reach for the phone.
Something clutched at his heart and he lunged. She saw the motion, and, obviously spooked, skittered off her side of the bed and away. Abe grabbed the phone off its hook, ignored her, and spoke with a shaky voice.
"Hello?" Only static replied. "Who is it?" Katrina asked. Her voice shook. "Who is this?" Abe asked. There was no reply. Moments later there was a loud click, and the line went dead. As the dial tone cut back in, Abe hung the phone up and laid his face on the sheets, dazed. Then, very slowly, he released the breath he hadn't even been aware he was holding and rolled to his back. He covered his eyes with one arm. For the second night in a row he'd awakened bathed in sweat, and this time the dream wouldn't let go. He couldn't shake the sensation of flight. The images of the dream remained as vivid as if they were memories, and he didn't even try to speak until he heard soft footsteps and felt the bed shift slightly.
Katrina touched his arm tentatively, and he pulled it slowly from his eyes and met her gaze.
"What happened?" she asked.
"I had a nightmare," he answered. "It was worse than before, and not like anything I've ev
er experienced."
"Who was on the phone?" she asked, still not getting too close to him.
"I have no idea," he sighed. "Whoever it was didn't say a thing. It was probably just a wrong number, but I guess it freaked me out after waking up like that. I mean, who would call us at this hour?"
He saw from the way she watched him that she only half believed him. Abraham raised himself slowly, fluffed his pillow behind his back and held out his arms to her. She watched him for a moment, and then slid onto the bed and into his arms. Once they made contact, she was suddenly pressed tightly to his side, and he curled her into a tight embrace. Her hair tickled his nose and chin, and he buried his face in it. They stayed that way a long time, then, very suddenly, she pulled back—not out of his embrace, but far enough to pound her fist hard on his chest. She hit him again and was rearing back for a third shot when he grabbed her wrist and stopped her.
"You promised," she said. Her voice was hoarse, and he knew she was fighting back tears. "You promised you would never keep secrets from me, but you are. These dreams—that letter that came today—the phone call. You know what all of it is about."
She wasn't asking, and Abe knew better than to try and slip past her guard. He nodded slowly.
"I'm not sure where to start," he said. "I've never talked to anyone about any of this, and I thought I'd left it all far enough behind me that I'd never have to. It isn't that I was keeping secrets, Kat," he stroked her hair and pulled her close again, though she was a little stiffer in his arms, particularly at this last. He continued as if he hadn't noticed, determined to get through it now that he'd started. "It's that I hoped it would just go away, like the bad dreams. And it did, even the dreams were gone, but now they're back."
Abe reached down and lifted the leather thong with its dangling, equal-armed cross pendant. He fingered it absently, and feeling the motion, Katrina glanced up and watched him.
"Your father gave you that," she said.
Abe nodded. "This and a lot of other things, including some that I didn't want. He gave me the dreams, and unless I'm wrong about all of this, it's because of him that it's all come back to haunt me now."
"But," Kat lifted her head from his chest and stared at him, "you told me your father was dead."
"He is," Abe nodded, still fingering the medallion. "He died before I left the mountain. My mother is still there." He hesitated, still staring at the medallion and turning it over and over in his hands. "I wasn't sure of that until I got the letter."
He held the small cross still, its rough, hand-molded contours catching the light from the bedside lamp and glittering softly. Abe turned to face Kat.
"My father wore this until the day he died. My mother gave it to me after his funeral. She told me he wanted me to have it—that I needed it, but she didn't tell me why. Not then. In fact, she didn't tell me until just before I left the mountain for good."
"You shouldn't have to have a reason for owning something of your father's," she chided him softly.
"I have other things of my father's," Abe replied. "This isn't a gift, it's an anchor. It's like wearing a big psychic weight around my neck, and every time I turn in any direction but toward that mountain, I feel it drawing me back. I've taken it off dozens of times. I even had it in an envelope once, ready to mail it to her and forget about it forever, but something always happened to distract me, or to change my mind. In the early days, holding this and praying was the only way I could escape the dreams."
"You've never been back?" she asked. "You haven't called and talked to your mother?"
"There are only about half a dozen phones on the entire mountain," he laughed. "My mother would have no way to get the message, unless she went down to Greene's Store and paid to use his phone. If she'd done that, the old buzzard would have hovered over her shoulder and listened in on every word.
"Things are different up there. If you drive up to Friendly, it's pretty rustic, but if you take the fork past Greene's, you hit a long stretch of nothing, and shortly after that you'd be hard pressed to prove to yourself you weren't in another universe."
"But," Katrina frowned, trying to picture it, "how do they live? What do they do?"
"The same things folks on that mountain have done since the Spaniards first came to California and people started to settle. Some of them farm; there are grapes on the side of the mountain. Others raise goats and livestock, pigs, chickens—some do sewing, hunt and fish. You'd be surprised what you can get by on once you get yourself out away from the cities and the rules of modern society. They get an occasional sheriff up there, and now and then a Highway Patrol car braves the potholes in the road, but for the most part the people on that mountain might as well not exist to the world down here. I suppose that will change one day."
He stared off into the shadows for a moment, thinking. His fingers continued to work over the surface of the coin, tracing the patterns again and again. Then he snapped back to the moment.
"Then again," he said, "maybe not. There are things about that mountain that defy description. There are stories I have never told anyone because when I tell them to myself, they sound ridiculous and surreal. I have memories that I could be convinced were nothing but delusions, or dreams. At least, you could have convinced me a few days ago."
Katrina stared at him, waiting for more. He saw the confusion in her eyes and closed his own, trying to settle the memories, and the roiling mass of questions that had surfaced over the past two days, into something he could tell her that would make sense.
"There were two churches on the mountain when I was a boy," he said at last. "One was my father's. It was the highest thing on the mountain that I ever saw, except one. There were peaks that reached further, but I never climbed them, and I don't believe anyone I knew ever did either. The church was like a boundary, cutting us off on the upper reaches. The other church was lower, the furthest thing down toward the back road out of that part of the hills. I came out past it when I left."
Above my father's church there was a place he used to go. It was a small stone cottage, so old that no one remembers who built it—what kind of people they were, or even if we descended from them. It was just there, had always been there. The church was the same. We kept it up, put in a stone walkway and built some trellises around the graveyard behind it, but none of us knew how long it stood there—not even my father. I asked him, but he only knew the history back as far as it had been recorded in writing.
"That was more than 150 years, and he believed from the words recorded in those early times that the church was old when they were written. We will probably never know, and I don't think it's important. The last time I saw that church was his funeral."
"Tell me," Kat said. She'd caught the hesitation in his voice, and he bit back the sharp reply that threatened. He didn't want to tell her. He didn't want to think about that place, or that day.
"It was a very long time ago," he began slowly, "but I remember it as if it happened yesterday."
Abraham had not thought of that old church, or of his father, in longer than he'd been willing to admit to himself, let alone to another. His father's funeral was a memory of darkness and mourning. He remembered sitting between his mother and his Uncle Keith on the bench in the church. They'd brought in the preacher from Friendly, California, Reverend Forbes; a skinny, stick of a man with wavy hair and wild eyes. He'd glared at them from the front of the church as if they'd all been caught masturbating in a closet, not like a man of God who was troubled over the loss of a fallen comrade. Abraham had spent every Sunday of his life in that small stone church, and the sensations Reverend Forbes brought with him had felt as alien and impossible as the loss of his father.
That preacher stared them into silence and began to speak. He began while they were still coming in the doors. He had his Bible in his hand, like he was afraid that if he let it touch the old stone pulpit of Abraham's father's church, it would be contaminated. He shook it at them. He fanned the air with it, and he
gripped it white-knuckle tight in the dying light of the later afternoon sun, but he did not let it touch the stone. He did not touch the stone. If he could have floated above the floor, Abraham was sure he would have done so.
Reverend Forbes did not talk about Jonathan Carlson at all. He railed against sinners everywhere, the tone of his voice showing clearly that he felt that everything beyond his own church in Friendly became steadily more evil, and that Satan's blood dripped down the sides of the mountain, infecting all of those below with his darkness.
There were reasons for his words, of course. Some of the meaning had been clear to Abraham, even then. The stone chapel was not the only church close by, and though there was no one preaching at that other, there was no longer anyone preaching at this one either. No one that belonged.
Both houses of worship lay empty, waiting for God, or someone, to fill the pulpits and draw the people. Between those times they would live beyond the sight of God, unless of course they wanted to find their way further up the mountain to Friendly every Sunday. Reverend Forbes mentioned that too. He'd been very concerned for their souls.
It was obvious early in the ceremony that he had not known Reverend Jonathan Carlson, and equally obvious he did not count this as a spiritual loss. He intimated that God had begun to cleanse the mountain. He spoke of shadows hovering beyond the sight of civilized men, waiting to sweep in and blot out the light of the Lord's love. He talked for what seemed hours, though in retrospect, Abraham knew his mother and the others gathered would not have stood for that, even if he did frighten them. It had probably lasted no more than an hour.
The words had poured around Abraham in a meaningless jumble. He'd sat huddled up against his mother, who sat numb and motionless, staring through the preacher and the back wall of the church as if gazing into the pits of hell. Abraham was used to his mother being close and far away at the same time. He was used to her mumbling words he couldn't understand, or starting from her seat and crying out when nothing had happened. He was used to the stares of his neighbors, and the quiet disapproval of his family.
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