I couldn’t look away as Lizbeth knocked them back one at a time, then two together—and another one from behind her, caught nearly by accident on the backswing as she brought the axe around again for another pass.
And when the last one (I dearly hoped it was the last one) went down in a pile at her feet, Nathaniel Barrett growled, crouched, and leaped off the hood of that truck . . . I couldn’t watch it. Not anymore.
I turned and ran, just like she’d told me. I made a lot of noise, but I was fast. Once I found the road again, I stayed at its edge, ready to dive back into the trees, thinking about that straight line I’d drawn with my brain. I held it in my head, and concentrated as I continued running.
My ankle went a little weak when I hit a hole, and I thought it was going to twist up in pain, but it went cold instead. I tried to keep running, but the cold got a grip on the other foot, too.
I was scared as hell—here I was, having a spell right in the middle of running for my life.
Except this time, the spell didn’t hit me all the way. It tangled around my feet, but it didn’t rise; it might be better to say that it kept me from falling again. I had to pay attention to my footfalls, and where the road was pitted, gouged, and uneven.
And in the back of my head, the spell spoke in Father Coyle’s voice. I didn’t see him, but I heard that old familiar whisper filtered through a million miles, on the other side of heaven.
Veer to the right. Go around this tree, don’t worry. Stay calm. Only a little farther.
“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled at him.
But he continued. The chief is almost here, and you’ll meet him almost at the crossroad, but not quite. Here, look. Here’s the highway.
I drew up to a sudden, none too graceful halt at the edge of a road paved properly. “To the . . . to the right? Are you sure?”
He didn’t answer. The cold melted away from my ankles, and when it did, I almost folded up like a chair. I hadn’t realized how it’d been holding me up; I only thought it’d slowed me down. My ankle hurt like the devil now, and I guessed I’d sprained it after all, but the father had kept it from bothering me so I could get away.
I started to cry, just a little. I missed him. Without him, I sometimes forgot it. Without him, would I have ever made it back to the road?
Behind me, something roared so loudly it drowned out everything else—and that’s when I realized I hadn’t heard the weird rumbling noise since Father Coyle started talking. But here it was again, and a thousand times louder. It wasn’t alone, either. It came with a rocking shake, an earthquake—I knew that’s what it was, even though I’d never been in one myself.
(I’d heard plenty about them from a teacher I’d had once, who’d come from San Francisco. She’d told me that the earth pops up and down, snapping like a sheet flapped across a bed. She said you could watch it, if you were standing in the right place; you could see the ground and the trees rising and falling in waves.)
I wasn’t standing in the right place. All I could see was the line of trees behind me, and a ghostly faint glow in the middle where Barrett’s truck must be. As I watched, even that glow went away. It winked, shook, and dropped away—and I thought that the headlamps went shooting up to the sky, like the cab had been pushed onto its rear end. But that would have been crazy, right?
Off to my right, just like Father Coyle had told me, there were cars coming. I heard a siren, or a thin thread of one, cutting through the roar that came from Chapelwood, loud like a mountain falling down. I saw the light, and if it wasn’t Chief Eagan, I was a dead woman.
But if I tried to go back, I was a dead woman, too. Maybe the inspector was dead, but I couldn’t think about that. Maybe Lizbeth was dead, but I couldn’t think about that, either. I’d think about it all later, maybe while lying in bed in the weeks that came after, trying to sleep, and wondering where George Ward had gone, what the inspector had seen, what had become of all the people who’d just vanished but didn’t die. I’d wonder who Nance was, and why she’d mattered to Lizbeth.
I’d wonder, and wonder, and wonder.
But right then, with the cars coming down the highway, I only wondered if the stars would ever come back.
I missed them.
Inspector Simon Wolf
OCTOBER 4, 1921
I descended the stairs by feel, for although there was a distinct white glow somewhere at (what I presumed must be) the bottom, it wasn’t enough to do my eyes much good. Did I say the glow was white? Well, to be honest I’m not so sure. It had a white quality with a yellow undertone; it was white like the sun is white, though when depicted in art it’s often shown in shades of gold. I’m talking my way around what I mean, but since I can’t pinpoint my precise meaning, this will have to do.
You’ve asked for a report, so I will give you one. And you will take what you can get.
That said, I move more smoothly in the dark than people typically expect. It’s no secret—I’ve mentioned it before—that my eyes are very weak, without the aid of lenses; and it’s somewhat less well known that I had no access to such lenses until I was an adult.
(I don’t often speak of my upbringing, but it was not the sort that allowed for recreational visits to an ophthalmologist, I assure you. It was the kind of upbringing where meals were often uncertain, and maybe I have spent the rest of my life in compensation for that early inadequacy. I’m sure some alienist or psychiatrist would have a grand old time deciding it, but I don’t care, so I’ve never asked one’s opinion.)
To sum up, I spent a very long time regarding the world without much detail and with no precision at all. To navigate a set of stairs without the aid of my eyes . . . it’s not comfortable, but it’s familiar. It’s something I can do by rote, putting my feet down one after the other, lowering myself toward that glow that did very little except provide that pale absence of color, somewhere far away.
I hoped it wasn’t too far. I suspected I would have to climb those stairs again, in order to make an eventual escape. The fewer of them, the better.
In fact, it might have been three or four flights of stairs—I hadn’t been counting them, so this is only a lazy estimate. Or not lazy, that’s the wrong word. I was hiking them, wasn’t I? There was nothing lazy about it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, that I’m having such trouble with my vocabulary, when it comes to that night. To that staircase. To that room I found at the bottom.
A room . . . well, I can’t think of another word for it, so that will have to suffice. It was much larger than any room you can imagine, though. Infinitely larger than anything that ought to have fit underneath Chapelwood, or the entirety of Alabama, for that matter.
Or rather . . . it wasn’t infinite in actual size, but it certainly conveyed a sense of the infinite. I knew, upon reaching the bottommost stair, that I was quite some distance underground—thirty or forty feet, at least—but I felt that I was somewhere else entirely.
It might have been the sky’s fault, by which I’m trying to say . . . there had been no stars that night, and none the night before, either (now that I consider it). The sky above had been nothing but a thick black curtain covering any source of light that might have reached us from space.
So when I stepped off that bottommost stair, into this chamber (“chamber” is probably a better word), and I looked up to the ceiling . . . I did not see a ceiling. I saw the black expanse of space above me, space without moon or stars. They were all someplace else. They were all gathered together behind the altar.
Wait. Let me explain the altar. Or let me explain the room first.
The room was quite large, as I’ve said. Wherever the ceiling was, it was high enough overhead that I couldn’t dream of touching it; and the floor, smooth as marble—it might have even been marble, black marble as stark as onyx—was marked with designs drawn in salt. These designs were concentric circles, but they were not evenl
y spaced. It took me a moment to realize that I was looking at the solar system. Each of these rings represented the orbit of a neighboring celestial body, and each of these planets was marked with a tidy little cairn that was lit and burning with incense. I smelled sage and sandalwood, and something sharper (but I couldn’t decide what it was). The raw, wet, rotting smell upstairs was wholly absent here, for this place had been purified. The herbs alone wouldn’t have done it, but something did.
It was clean, do you understand? Purified. Holy. The holiest, if the reverend’s assessment could be believed. (And he believed it.) The claptrap, altered, added-on-to mansion upstairs was not a church. This was a church.
The salt lines swooped across the floors in their lovely arches, untouched by footprints or scuffs, scrapes, or other disturbances. Their sweet-smelling, improvised planets did not line up, so much as they provided a series of stops on the way to the altar at the middle—where the sun ought to be, but a vast white stone sepulcher awaited instead. It was round, yes. Spherical, even—except that the top was flattened, cut off so cleanly it might have been sliced with a razor.
I wanted to stare at it, but I was nearly blinded by the thing after traveling through so much darkness to arrive there. So instead I shifted my gaze along those planets, those cairns that stood for them . . . and I realized that they must be stations. Like the stations of the cross, in any good Catholic establishment. That’s precisely the purpose they served. They were a map to salvation.
I wondered where the light was coming from. The chamber was illuminated, yes, but the sheer unsullied whiteness of that altar could not have been its source. Or could it? On second (or third, or however many) thought, I can’t rule out anything as impossible.
Not after what I saw there. Not after what came next.
I walked those stations, tiny altar to tiny altar, on the way to the great one at the center. I was careful to keep from touching the salt; it felt like sacrilege to consider it, but the toe of my shoe found it tempting, at times, and I was tracking dirt across the pristine place anyway. I told myself that this might be the place where all the dirty things came to be cleaned—literally and symbolically both. But I’ve told myself a lot of things over the years, and that one makes as little sense as any of them.
So I walked the stations.
At the edge, I passed what stood for Neptune, and past it a few yards I touched the edge of Uranus and felt the simmering coals; I paid my respects to Saturn, breathing the ashes of its rings; I visited the great giant Jupiter, where I smelled amber and myrrh; I stopped by Mars and smelled only fire, only the chemical warp of sand melting to glass; and then our own home, with a whiff of ocean air and fresh dirt.
I was very close then. Yet still I could hardly bring myself to look up and see the altar, the great Sol at the middle, where all roads led—or all lines encircled. You see? It’s awful, how insufficient this vocabulary is. It’s embarrassing, how I found myself dazed and moving closer, closer, to something that could not possibly be good.
Here was Venus, cool and smelling of morning mist when the air is nearly frozen. Even though the incense smoldered, when I hovered my hands close to its edge, I felt only a chill.
There was a noise. There had always been a noise, hadn’t there? I remembered it from upstairs, from inside the false church and underneath it. I think I’d grown so accustomed to it that I simply hadn’t heard it anymore. Unless . . . could the chamber have cleaned the noise away, too? No, that couldn’t be right. The smell was gone, the dirt and mildew of the dug-out places were gone, but the sound . . . the sound remained.
There, closer to the center, it was less like a garbled noise. I almost thought it might be a song, but it was no music I’d ever heard; and I cannot say that it was lovely, or grating, or anything an ordinary mortal might use to describe a set of notes. But it was compelling. So compelling, it might have been what drew me forward to that altar, or maybe it was the light that, yes, came from that weird white stone after all.
The vivid white glow emanated from the top, from the flat portion. It projected upward but not very far. It made me think of a lantern behind a sheet of waxed paper, diffuse and present, but not far-reaching.
Mercury. Small and red were the coals, smelling of char and hickory. The cairn was so warm that I couldn’t bear to stand beside it long, even to gaze down at the patterns made by the tumbling ashes, rolling over one another as if stirred by a poker.
Only a few feet more. Then three steps, each one’s corner sharp as an axe head.
The altar was almost the size of the automobile I’d arrived in. It was white, so very white. So pure that, if it was marble, I’ve never seen its equal—devoid of flecks, veins, or any speck of color. I don’t think it was marble. I don’t know what it was, but I do not believe it was of this world, and I will stand by that statement regardless of how it sounds.
I wanted to touch it, and I wanted to run away from it screaming.
I did neither of those things. I stood beside it, and I gazed down into it—for the top was not flat, per se. It was no shelf, no platform. It was a window to something else, and in it, I saw my own reflection. And someone else.
My head jerked up. I was eye to eye with Reverend Davis, robed as black as the floor and ceiling and walls, wherever those walls might actually be hiding. His hands were covered in gloves, but the gloves were too long, or else his fingers were too long—he’d been changed, too, just like everyone else. Not in the same way, I don’t suppose. The high priest never dresses like the mere supplicants, after all.
He did not move. He only stood there across from me, this window to another world between us, and the groaning music of some vast machine or entity or instrument filling the air with the incense, the smoke, the simmering hiss of settling coals in the planetary offering places behind me.
“What do you see?” he asked me.
“A madman,” I said.
“What else?”
At least he had the decency not to argue with me. “I don’t know.”
“At least you have the decency not to lie.”
“Are you reading my thoughts?” I asked quickly. I know how to tamp them down if I need to; I’ve spent so long in an office with psychics that it long ago became a necessary skill.
He shook his head. “No. But He is. And He tells me what he sees.”
“Rather roundabout way of doing things.”
“This is no place for mockery.” He frowned at me, and I didn’t really blame him. But self-restraint has never been my chiefest virtue, now has it?
“And it’s no place for a young woman who’d rather be elsewhere.”
“This is exactly where she ought to be. It’s where she will be, sometime before dawn. It’s been written in the stars, or in the ledgers that describe them.”
I thought of Lizbeth above, and Ruth—who’d already escaped them once tonight. I fervently wished them the best, and I didn’t care if this mysterious “He” knew about it. I didn’t know where they were. There was nothing It could glean from my optimism.
“We must agree to disagree.”
“I’d rather that we come to some kind of . . . understanding.”
I wanted to laugh in his face, but I couldn’t. I’m not sure why. “I doubt that’s possible.”
He paused. “No, you don’t. You’re deathly afraid that it is. Look,” he urged, gesturing at the perfectly round window in the perfectly spherical altar. “Let me show you what I mean.”
I wanted to look away. Or did I? Well, I couldn’t look away.
I’m sorry. I wish I’d been stronger. (Or do I?)
On the other side of the window I saw the whole universe, and that’s the goddamn truth. I saw all the stars that had gone missing over the last couple of nights; and I saw the arms of galaxies undulate like tentacles, like an octopus spinning in a slow, amazing circle. I saw spirals made of li
ght—no, made of stars. Made of suns. I saw the hints and blinking flashes of other spirals, other clusters, other tentacles dancing across the void, which was never a void at all.
I could lie to you, in this report. If I wanted to, I could say that it was all a mirage caused by the mesmerizing powers of that reverend with his slick black hair, his slick black hands (I don’t even know if they were gloves at all), his slick black robe that must have been made of silk.
But that wouldn’t be true. It wouldn’t be true to say that it was only a clever magician’s ruse, and that the noise that filled the chamber did not come from something enormous on the other side. I could say that there was no great He, nothing to read minds and speak in numbers. Nothing that waited for an invitation to come through that window and join our world.
Lies, all of it.
Theoretical lies, since I never offered them up as anything else, and since I’m giving you the whole story here, now, and I don’t care how it makes me look. Does it make me look mad? Is that what you’ll tell me? Save your breath, for I know that already. If you think I’ve gone around some bend, then you could be forgiven. All I can do is assure you of the contrary.
I didn’t know what I was seeing, when it swung into view. I saw it only in passing as it floated, bobbed, wandered. I sensed that it was more asleep than awake—that the reverend had stumbled upon something with worse than infinite power, and he thought that it was interested in him, in his little human thoughts in his little human church.
But what I saw had no interest in mankind, not in the slightest. What I saw was a slumbering organism of absolute inscrutability and apathy, and if it had some passing fancy to visit Earth, none of us would live long enough to regret the visit.
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