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 remembered. 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 trut
h 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.
So Silas stayed close, kept his fingers wrapped tightly in his mother's coat, and held his silence. The woods were different on Sundays. Any other time when the families gathered you heard screaming children, laughing women and catcalls among the men. Sunday it was as silent as a funeral—and to Silas, who had attended two funerals in his nine years of life—it was very much the same.
They stepped out of the line of trees and saw other families trudge slowly through the wide-open front doors of the church. Without a word, Silas' father stepped into the rear of the line, and they shuffled inside. Reverend Kotz stood to one side of the door, smiling his too-wide smile with his too-white teeth, his suit so dark that if you stood him in front of midnight he'd show up as a shadow. His hair, just as dark, was combed back carefully, and as he greeted each family with a handshake on their arrival, something seemed to pass from their hands to his—some spark of energy, or life that they'd brought with them into the woods, but would never see again.
Silas' family took seats near the center of the church. Reverend Kotz had left his post at the door and strode purposefully up the center aisle without a glance to either side. Silas stole a quick look over his shoulder, and he shuddered. If he had been allowed to bet, he might have bet that the good Reverend felt the glare of the thing that lived above the door boring through the back of his skull. Everyone felt it, though no one spoke of it. Silas had asked his mother, one time, what it was, and why it was there, but his only answer had been a reproachful, almost fearful glare, and he had never mentioned it again.
Now, as he remembered this, Silas saw to his horror that Reverend Kotz stopped, stood very still, and turned. The man glanced over his shoulder, directly into Silas' terrified eyes, and in that instant, Silas knew the man had heard his thoughts. Kotz released Silas from his gaze and turned to smile up at the recessed alcove above the rear door. Then he turned back toward the altar and the curtains beyond. The entire exchange happened so quickly that Silas could not tell if it had happened at all. His parents gave no sign that they had noticed the Reverend's attention, and the man already stood beyond his wooden podium, searching the doors and the assemblage for any stragglers foolish enough to enter the church beyond the appointed time.
Silas shook his head, blinked back a sudden rush of tears, and lowered his head. All around him families shuffled their feet, Sunday dresses rustled and men cleared their throats nervously while trying to remain as silent and still as stone. No one wanted to be the one to catch Reverend Kotz's attention. No one wanted their lives, or their deeds dragged into the sermon, or a blemish on the marker they would ante up for the salvation of their soul. No one wanted to face the pool. You could hear the water, if everyone was silent. It sloshed a little against the edges of the tank. You could hear other things too. The baptismal pool was not the only thing behind that curtain, and they all knew it. While they were frightened, they were also expectant. The longer Reverend Kotz stared out over them, the deeper that expectation became. The nervous drumming of hands and feet ceased. Their breathing slowed, and lips parted, tongues licked at the dry, cotton-flavored fear that coated their lips and choked their throats. Sweat beaded on their skin and ran in dark rivulets down the men's starched white collars.
Silas glanced at his mother and saw her eyes upturned to the altar, her chin jutted out slightly. Her hands were clasped on top of her purse, white-gloved and dainty, but gripping one another with such pressure that Silas cringed. She didn't even know he was there. None of them saw one another, but only that man in the front of the church, glaring at them with the wrath of God himself sparking in his eyes.
Silas had seen something similar one other time, and he drifted into the memory—anything to keep him from glancing up at the altar. He had seen the faces of those who spent too much time meeting Reverend Kotz's eyes, and he had seen those who went to the pool. Those who were cleansed would never meet his eyes fully, and when he spoke to them, even the children, they lowered their gaze and hurried off as if he might learn a secret they didn't want him to have—or see something they were too ashamed of to share.
On the night he was thinking of, his father had taken him down the road to the Cooper's barn at dusk. His mother hadn't wanted him to go, but Silas' father was not a man to let his woman make decisions for him. The men had gathered and were drinking. A circle had been dug in the center of the barn's floor. It dropped off about three feet from the ground level, and the men were gathered around it, laughing and talking excitedly.
It was a cockfight, the first and last Silas had ever seen. The birds were penned on opposite sides of the pit. Silas' father found room for the two of them to the left of a great white rooster with flecks of brown and gold peppering his feathers. The animal was beautiful at first, but when you got too close you saw its eyes. They were shining, solid marbles of glittering darkness, fierce and angry beyond measure. The bird was fitted with fighting spurs—wickedly curved metal blades that enhanced its already dangerous legs.
The birds were bad, but the worst was the men. The closer they came to the moment of the contest, the thicker, hotter, and more difficult to breathe the air became. Everything slowed to a surreal blur, bright white bulging eyes glared and stared and droplets of sweat were flung with every motion. Silas' father was no exception, and though it frightened him, Silas himself was slowly drawn into the dark web of their excitement.
They slid the pens to the edge of the pit, and the men jeered at the handlers as the birds lunged, trying to draw first blood on the men who would cast them into the pit before the battle was joined. The laughter had a sharp, cutting quality, and though they all waited breathlessly for the birds to be released, Silas knew there was a lust for blood to be drawn, even if it came from the handlers.
It was then that Silas looked up and met the eyes that stared back at him from across the pit. They were concentrated, ignoring the others surrounding them, and paying no attention to the cocks in their rickety pens. The Reverend Kotz held Silas easily in the ice of his glare, and then threw back his head and laughed.
The sound of that laughter rose above the voices of the other men. It echoed from the walls, reverberated and grew in volume and strength. Silas forgot the pit, his father, the others—everything but those eyes, and that laughter, drawing him in. The Reverend's lips moved and formed words Silas couldn't make out, and the man stretched out one long, almost skeletally thin arm, beckoning.
Silas trembled, tried to press back and away, but bodies on all sides penned him in. To his left a large bony farmer pressed close, and on the right Silas' father leaned into the pit, oblivious to his son's churning backward steps, driving back against him in a frantic effort to cut through the pack. Silas fought, but the power of Reverend Kotz's eyes compelled him. The words the man spoke and that Silas could not hear took on grave importance. He had to know them, to hear them and make them his own. It was important.
He took a step forward. He reached out his hand. The sound around him had ceased to register in his mind. The faces, the voices, everything but Reverend Kotz's face, and the voice he could not make out, disappeared in the bright lights. He had to get closer. One more step, maybe two and…
The world dropped away. Silas screamed, and suddenly the others were there again, their voices, their guttural screams. A huge, meaty hand gripped Silas suddenly by the hair and he was yanked backward. He toppled toward the ground, and they made way grudgingly to let him pass—and fall. Eyes glared at him from all sides, voices cried out, and in the background he heard the shrill screeching of the cocks.
They closed in before him and cut him off from the sound and the pit. He lay there for what seemed hours, but couldn't have been more than a moment or two. The dust of the old barn's floor rose ab
out him in choking clouds and his head rang from connecting with the floor.
A roar of sound rose, and he remembered what he'd seen in the cock's eyes—knew that something momentous was taking place, and that he was missing it. The eyes shifted in his mind to those of Reverend Kotz, and he rolled to the side, retched, and staggered to his feet. He wanted to see—to know what was happening.
There was no way to force his way through, but Silas found that he was able to pry a small crack between his father's legs, ignoring the danger of being trampled. The edge of the pit was only a few inches away, and he crawled to it, raised himself from the billowing dust and peered over the edge.
The white rooster had fallen. It lay in a bloody heap in the center of the pit. A rust colored bird with blood dripping from its beak strutted around the fallen warrior, ready to raise its crowing voice to the heavens and proclaim victory.
Then it happened. In a split second, the universe shifted. The white bird, half-dead in the dirt, lashed out with one leg in a lightning blur of violence that was so quick, so sudden, and so final that Silas only realized he was holding his breath when his eyes watered from the exertion and his arms trembled from the effort of holding him off the ground.
The blade strapped to the rooster's spur slashed cleanly across the other bird's throat, stopping him mid-strut with a squawk of dismay that liquefied to a gurgle. The rust colored bird dropped dead as a stone, and the white bird limped in a slow circle, leaned on its broken wing and ruined leg and kicked up tiny puffs of dust with the one good leg. The silence was as thick as the sound had been, thicker, perhaps, suffused with shock.
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