Someone in the rear of the church started a generator, then another.
Light flooded the church in a sudden blinding flash that flushed shadows from the corners and sprayed out through the sparkling new glass of the windows to bathe the forest to either side with brilliance. Silas crossed the threshold of the church and spun slowly.
He felt the shadowed caress as the craggy horns brushed through wood planks and stretched up toward her face. His sight dimmed, then focused, and the light shifted subtly.
He saw the solid planks of the walls, the sturdy new frames of the windows, and the buffed gleam of the hardwood floor beneath his feet. He saw the stained wood beams crossing the ceiling and the chains of the chandeliers. Sconces lit the walls in patterns and circles, each falling just short of reaching the next.
Silas placed his palms flat on either side of the doorframe. He craned his neck until his gaze fell full on her face. The walls were translucent, webbed with strands and veins and crossed with deep green, glowing lines of power. They stretched thinner as they groped for the far end of the building, grew thick and powerful near the door and swept up.
Her eyes glinted deep in the alcove, and he caught that spark. Her hair rolled in thick, root-like waves, up to the ceiling; down and out to walls and floor, strand over strand it bound the building on levels beneath the surface. Silas held his gaze locked on that wooden countenance. His body shivered with the strain of the pose, but his hands held his weight. Like very thick syrup the wood parted. Silas' fingers sliced in and he gasped as the tips brushed the deep green hair and tapped into the glow.
He heard voices deep and low.
The others had gathered outside the doorway and begun to chant. They pressed their palms to the walls, brushed their cheeks against the rough wood and leaned close. Women ground their breasts and hips into the wall.
Men slid up and down against the coarse planks. Their collective voice vibrated with energy.
Silas curled his fingers into the walls and closed his eyes. The sound of their voices was deep and rhythmic. It grew to the pulse and beat of a great heart. He balled his hands into fists and gripped the green strands of energy within the wall.
He felt the pulse of energy flowing within, the transfer of life.
It began at his booted feet and flowed upward slowly.
His legs grew taut with heat and his groin swelled. He curled his arms like an athlete ready to chin-up on the wall, but he was a circuit, held fast to the earth by the growing current that washed through his chest and flashed to the tips of his fingers. His neck grew hot and he tried to throw back his head and scream.
The antlers had pressed into the wood as well as his hands, and they held fast. The walls pulsed and sent ripples rolling toward the rear of the building. Silas' mouth fell open, but no sound emerged. The chanting grew in strength until the sound nearly blocked all thought, and with a great arching lurch he released the impossible grip, deep in the wood, tore himself from the wall and staggered back between the pews.
There was an audible snap of energy.
The chanting voices fell silent, and Silas heard the sound of bodies colliding, heard loud, keening cries of pain and surprise and low guttural curses. He ignored it all and fought for balance. The floor shifted beneath his feet like a restless wave and this time he stumbled forward. He caught himself on the end of one of the pews. His chest crashed into the solid wood, and he gripped it in a grotesque hug. The floor solidified, and he closed his eyes and fought for breath. When he opened his eyes again, the only light he saw was that of the sconces on the wall and the chain-shadow striped light of the dim chandeliers overhead. The walls were solid wood. He saw no trace of the veins beneath the surface, or the green glow.
Silas rose. His knees shook, but he felt strong and confident. He looked about the church slowly, searched each shadowed corner and scanned the pews. He was alone, and though he didn't glance up to where she watched from above, the other was silent.
"Holy shit," he said softly.
"Holy Christ on a stick…"
He walked back to the door and stared out into the churchyard. They huddled around their vehicles and stared from the trees. Some gathered in small groups for security, others stood alone, shadowed and waiting. Silas scanned the grounds carefully, catching the gaze of every set of eyes at least once, holding, and then moving on. After a few moments of this, he stared straight ahead and raised his voice so they would all hear clearly.
"We will worship on Sunday," he said.
"You will all be here. The mark will call you. She will call you, and you will come. The pool is whole—there will be a cleansing."
He turned without waiting for a response, and strode down the center aisle of the church. He imagined that there was a boy seated in the pews to his left, cowering beside silent, austere parents, staring at his back and praying Silas would not turn around. Praying that he would not turn at the pulpit, smile down into frightened eyes, and beckon toward the baptismal pool behind him.
He did not stop at the pew.
His legs had regained their strength, and his thoughts were clear and focused. He brushed aside the curtains that blocked the back room from sight and stepped through into the fluorescent lights and bubbling pumps of the baptistery.
The water in the baptismal pool sent glimmers of light to dance over the portions of the walls that weren't fronted by aquariums. These lined three levels of shelves and formed a semi-circle around the back of the pool; ten gallon tanks, 20 gallon, 55 gallon and even one 100 gallon tank stood in long, gleaming rows. The deliverymen had left them outside, stacked on pallets, and Silas directed their installation himself. The lower tanks were already filled to capacity, writhing and gleaming with silver and gold scales. Triangular heads rose from the masses of coils to track his progress as he circled the room slowly. They didn't strike at the glass, as they would normally have done.
These were wild snakes. They weren't used to the proximity of humans or the glass prisons that held them. Their eyes were cold and devoid of emotion, but the buzz of rattles and the soft dance of serpentine tongues spoke eloquently enough.
"Yeah," Silas said softly, walking slowly past the tanks and brushing his fingers lightly over the glass, "though I walk through the valley of death."
He turned his back on the snakes and stepped to the edge of the pool. The inside was painted a deep green that gave the water the appearance of the same color.
Lights imbedded in the base glowed softly, globes of green light that clung like great spider's eggs to the base of the pool.
Silas stood for a long time staring into that clear, slowly swirling water.
He felt pressure at the base of his neck, and he smiled. She wanted him to dip his head into her water.
She hungered. He knew the danger, now more than ever, but she would have to wait. They would both have to wait. Sunday was soon enough.
The water sped slightly in its slow, circular motion, and he frowned. There was no mechanism for this, it was a natural occurrence—or unnatural. He didn't trust her, and he didn't trust the pool. He knew it too well for that.
Silas closed his eyes. The water's motion was irritating him, shifting through his thoughts. She was trying to seduce him into the pool. It didn't matter to her that she might have to wait another thousand years if she took him; she was hungry. He had to balance her need against the strength of the shadow that controlled him. He wasn't certain how he could know this, but he did.
Almost the second he closed his mind, his thought snatched him away.
He'd seen this pool before. He'd been one of the last to see it before it was broken. He'd walked the center of the aisle under Reverend Kotz's hot scrutiny, and now, after so many years, he understood what it was that had bothered him about the man's eyes. He knew why it seemed like Kotz was taller than his body indicated, and more powerful than his skinny frame should have allowed for.
He felt the tingling weight of those dark, wooden eyes drill through to his heart, and he gasped at the memory.
For the first time in his life, Silas Greene wondered who Reverend Kotz had really been, beneath the dark surface. A farmer?
A sailor? Someone who happened to walk in out of the weather one day and got caught up in the spell of those black, black antlers, or charmed by that other's deep, wooden eyes and snared in the roping curls of hair?
Silas dropped to his knees before the pool, then slipped down beside it and turned. He pressed his back into the stone, dropped his head into his hands, and remembered.
The sun sliced through the church windows and crisscrossed the interior of the church with patterns of dust motes. Silas tried to watch Reverend Kotz attentively.
He had seen what happened to those caught daydreaming. He squinted through the stripes of sunlight and focused on the tall, dark figure behind the pulpit.
His mother sat rigid beside him. She held her hands firmly planted in her lap, her knees pressed together and her feet drawn back so that they disappeared beneath the austere length of her skirt. On Sunday she tied her hair so tightly atop her head that it pulled the skin. She spoke slowly and carefully when it was time for the congregation to respond, sang in a subdued, melodic voice during the hymns, and never removed her gaze from Reverend Kotz. Sometimes Silas saw goose pimples on the back of her neck and knew she felt that other—that thing above the door—but she never looked at it.
No one looked at it but Reverend Kotz himself, and even he avoided eye contact most of the time—if you could have eye contact with a carved head. The Reverend's words droned sonorously through the church, reverberated off the wooden rafters and echoed from all corners at once. Silas had difficulty understanding the mixture of King James scripture and fiery rhetoric. He couldn't be certain, but at times there were other words.
He heard them whispering along the edges of the room. They called out to him from shadows and rippled along the walls and ceiling.
Silas saw the church move the first time when he was three. He'd been seated beside his mother, fidgeting as the service continued interminably, when he saw the planks on the right hand side of the church, the wall he saw just over the curve of his mother's shoulder, stretch.
There was no other way to describe it.
The wood planks were about a hand's span in width, tightly joined with tongue-and-groove slots. Silas's father had explained such construction over dinner more than once, and he'd shown Silas their own porch, where both roof and floor were built in the same manner.
Tongue and groove was solid and permanent, two pieces of wood meshed and sealed, painted and strong.
Except that day the boards thinned. Silas watched, Reverend Kotz's voice shifted octaves, and the planks widened.
The color lightened slowly from pure, bright white to a sickly green, and instead of being solid, Silas saw straight through to the center.
He
saw long ropes of something that glowed and pulsed. He saw thick strands like roots, stretching up, down, and out to the sides. He felt the room expand and contract, breathing, and in that instant his lungs synchronized with that rhythm. He couldn't get enough air into his lungs, and his skin was damp with sweat.
He rocked back and his head struck the wood of the pew.
His mother turned slowly, her movements dream-like.
She frowned at him, never moving her hands from her lap. Silas' body grew taut and he stared down at those hands. He saw her fingers knead the flesh of her thigh, saw her nails slide up and down the dark pleated skirt. Her back arched in the seat, and her body undulated, matching the pulsing beat of the walls. The floor trembled, and Silas dragged his gaze from his mother's hands.
He leaned forward to stare at the floor beneath his feet, but he moved too quickly, or the floor jumped, or the walls bent inward like an accordion—or the pew leaped up to meet him.
He struck his head hard on the back of the wooden seat in front of him.
Sparks ignited in his head and he cried out. Hands gripped his shoulders and his arms and lifted him, but his mind blanked and he fell back into darkness. As he passed out, he heard the cry of the rooster, strutting in slow circles, one ruined wing dragging behind it and the blood of its opponent dripping from the spur on its leg. He heard Reverend Kotz's voice rise to a fevered chant.
The words flowed so quickly from the man's lips that the air vibrated—or maybe that was the throbbing pain in his head?
Darkness claimed a portion of his life in those moments. Silas remembered hitting his head. He remembered being lifted. He remembered the roaring wash of sound, crested by Reverend Kotz's voice.
The next thing he remembered was utter silence so dense you could run a finger through it and watch pieces cut from the fabric drop away.
It was empty, bleak, and terrifying.
He opened his eyes and a brilliant flash of sunlight from one of the windows burned away his sight, leaving everything a fuzzy wash of silhouettes and dimly discernible shapes. He knelt on the hard floor, and at first he couldn't understand where he was.
The pew should have been close enough in front of him to touch, and he looked in vain for any shape that might be his mother. He remembered his last sight of her, the motion of her hands, and her body, the way her thighs had pressed to the skirt and the deep, ragged heaving of her breath.