As he continued sliding her jeans down and off, Katrina heard him singing softly to himself. Bobby McGee. He was singing Bobby McGee to himself, stripping her jeans slowly from her body, and panting like a steam engine.
She sensed the hunger she brought him, and she fed it. Each time she had a chance, she lifted herself up, or turned in a way that lifted her breasts. She teased him. She brushed her thigh against his as he knelt, working at her jeans, and every time they touched, he grew more frantic and less controlled. Every time she touched him she forced the vomit back down her throat and repeated the words to herself. "Do something."
Then the moment came. He pulled her pants free of her feet and she helped him, drawing her knees up toward her chin. At that moment, he seemed to hear something, though there was no sound, and he stopped. He cocked his head to the side, her jeans held in his hands against his chest, kneeling in the dirt. In those seconds, Katrina screamed. She drew here knees tightly to her chest and then drove them out like pistons. She planted both heels soundly on her captor's jaw and convulsed her body, rippling up and off the ground like a snake, following through. There was a solid, satisfying crunch as she made contact and he fell back, stunned.
Kat didn't wait to see how badly she'd hurt him.
She caught the glint of light from the rising moon on something—the sickle. She rolled to her knees, gripped the wooden handle in both hands, and rose to her feet. She saw him moving, trying to rise. He wailed in pain and she didn't hesitate.
Tears streamed down her face again, but she brought the blade up and dashed it into his head. It stuck point first in his scalp. She tried to drag it free, but it was stuck, and she let go with a soft cry. She grabbed her jeans out of his hands and turned.
Her car was only a few yards beyond the barn door, and she limped to it as quickly as she could, fumbled the door open, cursing the knotted cords binding her wrists, and slid inside. There was no sign of her captor, but he could be right on her heels.
She knew that if he were alive, and he caught her again, it would be her last day of life.
She couldn't see Angel's prone form, lying in a pool of blood on the barn floor. The blade of the sickle caught him just to one side of his eye and dug deep. He and Tommy had spent long hours making sure all the bladed implements in the barn were like razors. The sickle was a favored toy.
It had seen service in wars with rats, had been flung at stray dogs—and it was sharp.
Angel's hand clasped the wooden handle, but he had lacked the strength to pull the blade free. His other hand was pressed firmly between his legs, and as his blood leaked out to soak the dirt floor, the black mark pulsed on his forehead, more and more slowly, until at last it faded.
Katrina found the keys in the ignition. There was no fear of car thieves on the mountain. People watched over what was theirs, and trespassers were dealt with. Sobbing so violently she could barely grip the keys, she finally managed to get them turned. The engine caught immediately.
She gasped in relief and sat back. It was hard to maneuver with her wrists bound, but she didn't want to stop to try and untie them. The car was an automatic; she didn't need to shift. If she could just get it into gear and the lights on, she would make it. She
had
to make it. Abe was down there somewhere, and she had to find him.
She flipped on the lights and screamed again. In front of her another man loomed. He was taller than her captor had been. He wasn't smiling, but he didn't seem angry, or surprised to see her. Kat was taking no chances. She slapped the car into gear, gripped the wheel with both hands and hit the gas. She spun in a quick curve, barely swerving around the man, who reached out to her and motioned for her to stop. She vaguely recalled the direction they'd come in and she turned that way blindly, watching the headlights arc over what appeared to be a rutted dirt road.
Then her head slammed back against the headrest as someone gripped her hair hard.
"Stop." A voice hissed in her ear. It was a woman's voice.
She considered hitting the gas and taking her chances, but the pressure on her hair was excruciating, and she let off the gas.
She punched the brake and sat, panting, as the man she'd barely missed trotted up, opened the passenger side door, and slid in beside her.
"Let her go, Elspeth," he said calmly.
The pressure released on Katrina's hair. The man reached for her, and she flinched away, but he made a clucking sound in his throat.
"Hold still," he said.
She did, and a moment later her wrists were free. She glanced into the rearview mirror, but all she caught was the flash of whites in a pair of pale eyes.
"You'd be looking for Abraham?" the man said.
It wasn't a question.
Kat nodded.
"Then drive," he said. She looked at him for a second, saw the cold, emptiness of his gaze, and did as he instructed. She lifted her foot from the brake and began the long, winding drive down and across the mountain.
The moon shone brightly in a cloudless sky, illuminating the trail down the mountain with rays like silver sunlight. Shadows stretched long and dark across the trail, the shades of tall pines and soaring oaks. Abraham paid no attention to any of it. He focused on the two objects that he carried. In his left hand he held the old book. It was bound in leather so aged and supple it felt like living skin. In his right hand, he held the small crystal vial. With each step that liquid splashed against the insides of the crystal and the vibration of it shivered through him and down through the bottoms of his feet into the mountain beneath.
The past hour was a blur.
Once the others had taken their places on the cross there was no time for thought or doubt. There were words and actions. The words flowed unchecked from his memory, and though he clutched the leather book so tightly it would probably bear his fingerprints forever, he didn't open it. There was no need.
Forces moved beneath and above them. Abraham felt great shifts of force. He sensed the blood of all of those who'd come before him coursing through his veins and rushing through the stone of the mountain. There was a bright, blinding light just out of reach and behind him. The one time he turned to look he saw nothing. It didn't cast any visible glow on the trail.
It wasn't a haunted spirit, or a floating ghost-image. It was more of a state of mind, a source of energy and power that spiraled down and into the earth and stone, driven into the heart of the mountain by their words and their actions.
That was the key; Abe knew this now.
His fears of a lack of faith cutting him off at the knees had faded with the realization that it was the ritual that mattered. It was the words, the actions—all of it performed like an intricate dance, as it had been performed in other times and other generations. The words were written in the book, but they didn't rise from the book.
Others who, like himself, simply knew them recorded them there. He knew the first time they were spoken they rose from within, unbidden and unchecked. They were only written down later, when it was over.
When the mountain was cleansed. Like a living thing, the mountain cared for all that was its own.
Abe had never asked his father about the objects in the box. He had been curious; how could he not have been? Still, they represented something very powerful, and very personal. The few times he'd seen them his father held them like eggshells. His eyes glazed, and he cocked his head like he was listening to something far away, or as if someone had whispered in his ear.
There had never been an appropriate time to ask, so Abraham held his silence.
Now that the objects were in his own hand, he understood. He felt their roots as he felt his own. Though he could not separate one voice from another among those whispering in his head, he caught snatches of it. One voice finished where another started. There was symmetry and coherence to it once you were used to the sensation. Abraham's father had seemed a very solitary man—almost a lonely man.
Abe knew, now, that his father had never stood alone. The privacy he'd always taken for granted had vanished the moment he knelt in the center of the cross in the cottage, and he wondered, even when their mission was over the objects he held were tucked safely back beneath the stone floor, if it would return, or if he even wanted it to.
The crystal vial was carved from the same huge geode that had provided the almost magical lens in the cottage roof. The water that it held came from a stream further up in the mountains. That stream poured from the mouth of a cave to trickle down the slopes to the stream, winding downward to ever larger waterways until it sought the ocean far beyond. It had flowed up and out of the heart of the mountain and been blessed, not by Jonathan Carlson, but a man generations in the past. The seal was tight, and did not leak; there was no sign of any evaporation or contamination.
Cyrus carried the leather pouch. Of all those present, he was closest to the root of the stone church. He was the one most grounded in the ritual. Abraham wondered why Cyrus had not moved into the cottage when Jonathan Carlson died. The others would certainly have acknowledged him as the logical successor. He knew the ritual, and Abe suspected the old man felt as much, or more, of what he himself was experiencing as any of them. Maybe for Cyrus the voices were even clear and distinct. Maybe clear enough, Abe mused, to differentiate one voice from another.
The pouch contained soil. The soil had been carefully scooped by hand from the walls of a cave. Without explanation for the knowledge, Abe knew that the man had been gone several days and believed dead when he staggered back to the doors of the stone church.
Abe didn't know how old the soil was, or the bag.
He didn't know the name of the man who'd brought it back. There were things he might never know if the voices spoke to him for a hundred years, but the important things sprang to the surface. If he concentrated on a thing he understood it. It was something he might have to ponder at length if they survived the hours to come.
One thing he grasped was what awaited them in the white church below.
This was no meeting of religious minds he approached. There was nothing human in the thing latched onto the side of the mountain, growing into and through the walls of that old church. There was nothing much left of the man that had been Silas Greene, either, and if they didn't arrive in time they might say the same for all of those caught up in the dark energy of the place.
In front of him, Barbara Carlson marched steadily down the mountain. Her steps were careful and measured. She understood the burdens the others wore and wielded, and she tempered their pace with caution. Her gaze swept the ground before them and occasionally the branches of the trees above, and the sky.
On Abraham's left, Harry George kept pace with him.
They were in step, having found the rhythm that Barbara set for them early on. Harry held the long, thin blade in his hand. It was carved wood, pointed at the tip and tapered back like a rapier.
He held this at an angle to the ground, and though it dangled easily from his grip, safely out of reach of the others, Abe had noted the strength of his grip. Harry's knuckles were white from exertion and the veins and muscles of his neck stood out like stacked cordwood. Abe wanted to reach out to the man and console him. He wanted to explain the need for a cool head and precision, but there was no explanation necessary.
He felt the others as clearly as he felt the mountain and the voices of the past. They all knew.
To the right Abraham's uncle, Jacob Carlson, matched their pace. He held a small lantern. It was made of metal, but the shade, like the vial in Abe's hand, and the geode at the cottage, was of crystal and faceted like a giant diamond. It shot splinters of light into the darkness and worried at the shadows, and it cast Barbara's shadow in a long flowing trail of darkness, swaying down the mountain.
They passed the old church in silence, and Abe saw the flicker of other lights among the trees. He saw the whites of many eyes and heard the shuffle and scuff of footfalls as they stretched out on the sides, and behind, lending their faith, minds, and energy to the ritual. Each time another fell into step, Abraham felt it.
The bright light he felt following them down from the peaks grew in intensity as they fed it with their presence.
And there were more than Abraham had expected.
They slipped through the woods like shadows. They fell in step behind Cyrus and matched their pace to the moving, shining cross that was formed by Abraham and the elders.
They moved with a stealth that was eerie, disconcerting, but oddly comforting. The sensation was of a single entity flowing down the trail and through the trees—a wave of energy connected at a single point.
Abraham was that point, the heart, and their blood flowed through his veins, pulsed with the rhythm of their footsteps and hummed in the stone beneath their feet.
They reached the foot of the main peak where the trail branched, and turned right along the tree line toward the clearing where Abraham's mother's cottage had burned.
The sensation of déjà vu was strong. He felt the words rise from deep inside, and could almost hear his father's voice singing as he joined in, his voice low and resonant. The others wound their voices in and around his, and the sound was a single thrumming voice, greater than all its parts and dependent on each. The mountain sang, and they moved through the clearing and onto the path leading into the trees.
Katrina turned where she was told to turn and eventually the old Chevy's wheels caught more firmly on solid ground.
The road, if you could really call the rutted trail a road, widened. Kat's heart trip-hammered, but she kept her expression stoic. This man said he would lead her to Abe, and she was going to do as he said—for the moment. She had no reason to doubt him—he'd known she was on the mountain and had seemed to be looking for her.
He hadn't asked a thing about the other man, and by the time he could get back up the mountain to that barn and find out what had happened, she would have Abe, and they could get the hell out of this crazy, backwoods place.
She expected to hear the girl in the back seat hum Dueling Banjos at any moment. Kat had only a couple of glances in the rearview mirror to judge by, but the girl frightened her.
She was small, not old, but her eyes were empty and cold. There was something smudged on her forehead, something Kat couldn't make out but wanted desperately to wipe away. She wondered briefly if showers were common here, or if they just made do with the occasional rain. There were no power lines along this wider road and there was very little sign of other vehicles passing.
None of them spoke. They came to a fork in the road. The left fork looked vaguely familiar, and she saw a low, flat roof in the waxing moonlight. Greene's Store?
She couldn't tell for certain. They turned down the other fork. This ran straight around the side of the mountain. It cut through the trees and the headlights' beam bounced crazily off trees and brush as they passed, apparently destined to hit every pothole on the way to wherever.
"Where's Abe?" she asked at last.
She didn't turn to meet the man's eyes, nor did she glance into the rearview mirror.
She didn't think either of them would hurt her while the car was in motion—their own lives were at risk if they did.
At first there was no answer, then the man spoke.
"He'll be along shortly," he said.
"To where?" she knew she was pushing it, but just driving through this dark, crazy, lifeless place without talking was driving her crazy.
"The church, of course," the girl in the back spoke up. "Cousin
Abe'll
be there tonight."
Katrina stared through the windshield, concentrating on the slow curves and bizarre landscape. She didn't want to plow the Lumina into a tree before she had a chance to either find Abe, or bolt. Had this strange girl said cousin?
"Abe is your cousin?" Kat asked.
"A lot of folks here are cousins," the man replied, cutting off any reply the girl might have made. "We don't get a lot of visitors from off the mountain, and when we do, they generally don't stay long."
I can't imagine why
, Kat thought.
Out loud, she said, "Abe never mentioned cousins."
"He wouldn't," Elspeth said.
The words were almost a spit.
"Him and his ma was always apart from the rest. Didn't act like kin at all."
The left front tire hit a rut and Katrina fought the vehicle back under control. She couldn't quit glancing at the girl in the back seat. There was something about that mark on her forehead, something very wrong, but she couldn't get a good look at it, and the last thing she wanted was to piss these two off.
They didn't seem to have a very high opinion of Abe, and that worried her, as well.
She hoped he wasn't in as much trouble as she'd been in herself.
She hoped she wasn't
still
in trouble. They'd released her wrists, but that didn't mean they were going to let her go.
She saw a glow through the trees ahead, and the man dropped a hand onto her thigh.
She flinched away and nearly swerved off the road.
"Slow down," he said. "There's services being held."
Kat eased off the gas and tried to relax.
She'd thought she was getting herself under control, but that single quick touch had her shaking like a leaf. She was far from okay. She suddenly thought about her blouse. All but a single button were torn free, and it was lower than she was comfortable with. She tugged at the tails of her blouse ineffectually.
She felt his eyes on her and squirmed in the seat, but she didn't meet his gaze. He hadn't touched her again, and that was a good sign. It was worlds beyond the treatment she'd gotten from her kidnapper, and she didn't want to push this guy over any edges.
They rounded the last corner, and the white church came into view.
It was brightly lit from within, but there was something… wrong…in the light that leaked through the shuttered windows. There was a cleared area to her left, along the trees, where several trucks were already parked. Kat pulled in at the near end. She didn't want any more between her and the road back out than she had to have, and her two passengers didn't complain.
She killed the engine, and turned to the man beside her.
"Let's go," he said with a smile.
"The Reverend has been looking forward to seeing you again."
Again? Before she could ask, the girl was out of the backseat and had pulled the driver's door open.
The man pushed her out the door, and Katrina stumbled into the shadows.
"Come on," the girl said. She giggled, and the sound was anything but funny.
Katrina nodded, closed the Lumina's door, and turned.
When she did, she saw the man more clearly.
He bore a slight resemblance to the man who'd kidnapped her, but that wasn't what caught her eye. On his forehead, just like on the girl's, a black swirl poked out from beneath his greasy hair.
The two of them took her by the arms and headed for the front doors of the church at a slow walk. Just for a second she heard voices, and something kicked in her heart. She didn't know why, but she turned to the woods and pulled against them. Then they were on the steps of the white church, and the chanting from within drowned out any other sound. The odd, greenish light shone through the two small, square front windows and stained the grass.
The man opened the door, pushed her through, and it closed behind them, cutting off the night.
Amos slipped in behind the white church silently.
He held the shotgun at the ready, as he would if he were hunting.
He scanned the shadows, and started at every sound. The old building was painted and polished. The last time he'd been out this way it had seemed ready to fall down, and now you couldn't tell it was old. Green, sickly light glowed in all the windows.