"If you are reading this," the note began, "then I am right, and I have failed.
You remember the night as well as I do; parts of it you may remember better than I do. If you hold this note in your hands, you have remembered. That is my consolation—if you are here, then maybe the failure is not complete. There is always time. There may be no greater truth in the universe than that. Nothing can change it…
"We left something incomplete.
We broke the pool.
We cast out the serpents. We were filled with our righteousness.
I knew what we were to do, and in my arrogance, I believed I knew better—that I had revelations from God—that it was my place to forgive.
"It was not men we faced in that church. Reverend Kotz was a vessel. The church itself was a vessel. The powers they held were mine to cleanse from the mountain, and I left them to fester.
I fear that with my passing, none will be vigilant. If this is so, then you have come home to a battle, Abraham; a battle I should have won long ago.
"She is evil. He is primal. Those are what you face. She does not belong here, but like a cancer she sends her roots into the mountain and drags out the life she needs to continue. He has always been here, but without her to warp the power of his energy, he was like the sky, or the snow on the highest peaks.
He was not a danger—he was part of the mountain."
Abraham read slowly, taking in the words and committing them to memory. He knew he would not be likely to get a chance to reread this note until everything was over.
The others were waiting outside. They would give him time, but not too much—there wasn't much to give.
Abraham turned his gaze back to the note, but the words faded to white. The light seared his eyes, but he didn't close them.
Images shifted through his mind like an out-of-control slide show.
He saw the pool. He saw Silas Greene lift something up.
Water cascaded around the chamber and Silas fell back.
The huge, pon
derous rack of horns rose up and behind him and swept through the
frames of wall and door as he fell, pulling a soaked, thrashing form after him.
Elspeth stared straight into Abraham's eyes.
Her face washed from frantic terror to despair to wicked glee in the flash of—what? A snake's body across her back?
A rivulet of water dripping back toward the pool?
Her forehead bore the dark mark, bright as fresh ink.
She fell away.
Images shifted again and Abraham stood in that room.
He stood behind his father, who held a book in one hand and a vial in the other.
He sprinkled from the vial and chanted.
His voice was loud, ringing from the walls of the church like peals of thunder. Abraham backed away. Snakes writhed on the floor, wrapping around his father's ankles and up his legs.
The floor was alive with them. The pool was alive with them, and it bubbled over. There was no water.
Something brilliant green and hissing like acid bubbled over the walls and onto the floor.
Jonathan Carlson did not flinch. He was not bitten. Abraham turned from the pool and the chamber and fled.
Others passed him—some he recognized—still he heard his father clearly.
Again the shift.
Her eyes were deep wooden pits.
They coiled in and in on themselves, rings of age in the wood, gnarled roots like ingrown nails, ropy, endless strands of hair stretching out to all sides.
He thought of the ocean. He saw wooden ships with prows slicing the storms and waves. She rode at the very tip of the front ship, lips curled into the storm and wooden hair flowing back to grip the sides of the ship barnacle tight, leeching its soul.
He saw another church, in another place.
Above the door, he saw the dark hole and he knew she was there.
He didn't see her, but he felt her, and he saw lines staining the wall where she dug in and fed. He saw the shadow of antlers on the wall over her head and felt the other—but different.
Older.
Not the dark horned presence of Reverend Kotz, or Silas Greene, but a shadow born of lust and fueled by virility.
The air was alive with the musky scent of him dipped in the deep green grip of her eyes.
He saw Elspeth again, heard her laughing and knew it was not her voice—not any longer. He saw Katrina, lying on a dirt floor.
Her back was against a wooden wall, and her wrists and ankles were bound.
Dirt streaked her face, and her blouse was torn. She stared up at him—no, through him at some other.
She screamed.
Everything shifted again as Abraham cried out in fury.
The static sound of his father's voice grew softer and softer, so faint it settled into background with the fleeing
hiss of serpents and so—Abraham spoke.
But the second he heard the tones of his voice, he stopped. The images fell away and he was alone in the very small cottage. He was bathed in sweat. Panic rose and he whispered his fear into the empty, quiet room.
"Katrina."
The beams of later afternoon sunlight had shifted angles up the wall and he knew he had waited as long as he dared. He skimmed the rest of the note quickly.
"They told me we should burn the church to the ground. They told me, and I knew that they were right, but I thought we had won. I thought, in the rubble of their precious pool and the flight of Reverend Kotz that we had achieved the cleansing, and so, I told them to forgive.
I told them forget.
I was wrong.
"When you go to that church, Abraham," the note ended, "watch it burn—and scatter the ash."
There was a soft knock on the door of the cottage, and Abraham rose without a sound. He opened the door and gestured for those outside to enter.
They stepped past him, ignoring the table and the candle. They moved to the corners of the cross on the floor—head, sword, light and back.
Abraham slid between them gracefully and knelt in the very center of the cross. He bowed his head, cleared it of thought, gripped the pendant around his neck, and began.
"I am the heart," he said. "I carry the blood of my father, and the blood of your fathers. I carry the blood of the mountain. Who will be my arm?"
It had begun.
Down the mountain, Amos Carlson glanced up.
He saw a glow on the peak, and he hesitated. He'd seen that glow before, remembered it from his childhood. He remembered the small stone church and the warmth it held. He remembered the long walk up the mountain's side each week, and the leisurely stroll back down, talking and laughing softly.
The trees that surrounded him had lost their comfortable feel. They no longer fit him like they once had. They didn't call to him, or draw him in. He saw the shadows instead of the trees that cast them. He heard the things that weren't there instead of the things he knew should be. His heart beat too quickly and a little harder than it should, and a cold sweat coated his brow.
He held the shotgun easily at his side, clutched in one hand, loaded and with the safety off.
He'd perfected the motion over decades of hunting; a quick flip of wrist and a turn of shoulder and death would lodge in both barrels. Where the woods had lost their comfort, the gun had molded itself to his hand. It moved with his steps and lent an extra limb to his shadow.
He thought of his sister.
Elspeth was a beautiful girl. She had taken care of him when he was sick, had lied for him when the two of them were in trouble. Though she was younger, she'd taught him things about himself that might have gone unlearned if he'd been left to his own devices. Hers was the voice of reason. Hers was the creative mind that took in all the details of stories and books and blended them into something new. She had told him stories when he was lonely and packed food for him when he needed to be alone.
Amos loved his mother, and his father, but he would kill for his sister. He knew this. He believed that Abraham would do what he could. Amos knew the stories. He knew what had gone before, but Abraham Carlson was not Jonathan Carlson, and Silas Greene and his brood were not the same challenge as Reverend Kotz had been. Things were darker on the mountain than Amos believed they'd ever been, or ever would be again. They were reaching a crossroad, and he thought maybe it would be a good idea if he approached that alone.
They might succeed. They might fail. The gun felt heavy and comforting in his hand. He would make a difference.
One way or the other, he would do what had to be done.
If his sister could be saved, he would get her out of there. If there was nothing else he could do, he would make sure both barrels of his shotgun poured their swarms of death into the face of one Silas Greene. If it couldn't be stopped, it could be slowed.
Maybe if you cut off the head of the beast it wouldn't grow back too quickly.
Maybe no one could step in and take Greene's place—not quickly.
Amos lifted his hat gently and tipped it to the stone chapel on the mountain, and the cottage beyond. He thought, just for a second, that he saw a flickering light moving down the trail in his direction. Then he shouldered the shotgun, turned, and disappeared into the trees, keeping a wary eye on the shadows and the trees themselves. He cut at an angle through the forest, straight toward the white church. The sun was setting over the peaks and the odd twilight drew all the shadows to double length. The clouds above were blood red.
As Silas went through the motions of leading his congregation in prayer he became aware of a change. It wasn't a subtle change, but a powerful, throbbing discordance in the rhythmic beat of what he had set into motion. The church fed on those within. He understood this. It did not feed on Silas because Silas had been consumed that first night in the wood, driven through fire to shadow. Only the framework and the basic instincts of the man that had been Silas Greene stood praying in the white church. What loomed over and above him and draped him in shadow was in charge.
He shoveled the others into the maw of a huge furnace, and the heat rose around them each time the stakes were raised. Now something else had joined the mix. Silas didn't recognize it, at first, and then—very suddenly—he did. He remembered as well as any the days of Reverend Jonathan Carlson and the stone chapel on the mountain. He remembered the night it had all come to a head here in the walls of the white church—the night the pool was broken and the serpents cast out. He remembered the night Reverend Kotz fled into the trees never to be seen again. Now it was more than memory. Memories flooded his mind, and not all of them were his own. Some belonged to Kotz—he felt the flat, snake-eyed malice of the man tainting their edges. Others belonged to those gathered before him. He had felt their thoughts brush his own since their marking in the woods, and that connection had grown in strength and clarity as time passed, but now they flashed like vivid slides. Each fit into the next like the pieces of some great, cosmic puzzle, and he understood.
The thing that had changed was Abraham Carlson.
He felt the boy's mind like a white-hot poker, probing the edges of his control and groping for a hold on the shadow that bolstered him. Where his mind met Abraham's, the darkness shied away.
Silas frowned. He sensed that Carlson pulled away, as well.
For just an instant he saw the girl, Elspeth, as he pulled her from the water, and like flickering signals down a telephone line the image transferred to Abraham's mind.
The connection wavered, and Silas' frown tipped back up to a smile.
There was something else, as well. The boy was not alone. There were other minds clouding his thoughts, or possibly safeguarding them. Silas felt these as well as a brooding, powerful force beyond it all. It loomed, like the shadow over his head, but Silas could put no name to it. He tried to pick apart the boy's mental defenses. He needed to know what he faced. He knew that, just as he was a more powerful, more focused vessel for the power that had fueled Reverend Kotz, Abraham Carlson was tapped into a different force, not weaker, but very different.
"Know thy enemy," Silas whispered.
He'd tried to spook the boy with the odd phone calls. He'd tried to frighten him from the mountain with the serpent. He'd killed the boy's mother and burned her home.
Still, Abraham Carlson was coming.
Silas reached out mentally and probed for Tommy Murphy. He flashed on trees, dark shadows, and a trail winding along the side of the mountain. It was impossible to tell how far he'd traveled, or how much longer he might be gone. Silas reached further and found Angel.
The vision was sharp and instantaneous. It burned with a heat of its own and Silas gasped, gripped the sides of the podium, and gritted his teeth. He concentrated. Angel's mind was a tumult of heat, memory, lust and indecision. It was like listening to two voices at once—one he could control, and the other that fought him every inch of the way.
Something was wrong, but he didn't have time to dwell on it.