Amos avoided the front of the building. He didn't want to be seen, and he knew that the thing he sought was not in the front of the church. It was fine for his Pa, and Abraham Carlson, and the others if they wanted to waltz up unannounced. Amos had plans, and they didn't include being spotted or captured.
The sound of an engine startled him. Not too many folks drove on the mountain. It wasn't easy to get gas, the roads were bad, and there wasn't anywhere you couldn't get to by walking, if you really needed to go. There were already more trucks here than he'd expected. They helped to explain how the building could be in such amazing repair.
A lot had been going on without most of the folks on the mountain even noticing. He hoped it hadn't gone too far.
Amos eased up to the back corner of the church and peered around at the parking area. A car had pulled up, and someone jumped out of the back seat. His heart sped. It was Elspeth. He knew her, even at that distance, and he nearly stepped away from the building to call out to her.
If he could get to her before she was inside, he might be able to get away quicker than he'd thought.
Then he saw a second figure pushed from the driver's seat, and a third emerging from the passenger's side.
He knew this one, as well. What the hell was Tommy Murphy doing with his sister? Why wasn't she running?
A moment later Elspeth and Tommy led the third person, a woman Amos didn't know, away from the car and up to the front steps. Amos hesitated. He could move now.
He could take Tommy a with single blast of the shotgun, save one barrel for escape, grab Elspeth and be out of there. But what if they saw him? What if they already had a strong enough hold on his sister that she wouldn't just leave with him?
There were too many maybes.
Amos hesitated, and the moment passed. The three were up the stairs and gone, and he faded back around the corner and backed into the trees to wait. If what he'd been told of this place was the truth, they'd come to the rear area soon enough, and when they did, he'd move. One way or the other, he was getting Elspeth out of there.
As he pulled into the trees, he heard it. Voices raised in song that rang through the trees. He turned, and in the distance he saw a glow above the tops of the trees, moving steadily down the main path toward the church. The song was familiar.
His mother had hummed it under her breath while cooking, and he'd heard his father sing it softly while fishing. He wanted to sing along. He didn't really know the words, but somehow, he did.
He actually took a step toward the sound, and then pulled back again. If they distracted those in the church long enough, he could be in and out before anyone was the wiser.
He had to stay strong.
As Amos pulled back into the woods, Barbara Carlson reached the end of the path, stepped into the clearing and stopped. Abraham stood behind her, and the other elders held the form of the cross. All around them, slipping from shadows and stepping out from behind trees, the others appeared. One by one they lined up to either side, more and more. Amos would not have believed their numbers, had he not seen. On the mountain, even kin kept to themselves most times. It was their way.
It was the mountain's way.
The churchyard filled quickly, and they all stood still, waiting, with Abe at the front and center of it all.
He held the leather book up before him, gripped tightly between his hands.
Inside the white church, Silas glanced up from the podium. He stared at the back wall, but his senses slipped through wood and shingles to the white-hot glow beyond. He shivered, and he felt the church tremble. The darkness that owned him swelled about him, and he gasped at its strength.
Then it relaxed, and he stood, staring out over the gathered congregation with an incredulous smile on his face.
"Hot damn," he whispered. "Showtime."
Deep in the woods a shadow flitted from one tree to the next. The figure was emaciated, thin as a sapling with straggles of hair sprouting at odd angles from his scalp. He didn't glance up at the moon. He didn't watch his back, or search the trees to either side. He heard the voice. He felt her eyes calling to him. He remembered.
240
He was so old that the concept of measurement in years had escaped him. His skin was the leather of old tree bark, and his eyes, though rheumy and pale, stared fiercely over a large, hawk-like nose. His clothing hung in tatters from skeletal limbs, and he moved like a giant insect in jerky steps that tottered him between shadows with deceptive quickness. His clumsiness was born of too many years of inactivity, but his mind burned with hunger and images that cut through to his heart and spurred him on. The glow from the church seeped through the trees. The moon was so bright that the man-made luminescence didn't shine as brightly as it might have, but he could have followed the vibration of their voices. He didn't need to see them to know they were there, or what was happening. He stopped and leaned on a tree. His ancient frame was wracked with a fit of coughing that rattled about in his bony chest with disturbing vigor. He was coming apart from the inside and would not have been surprised to cough up large chunks of his organs.
Unless his breath stopped altogether, it didn't matter.
He knew where he had to be; that was all the health he needed. After this night it wouldn't matter.
It would all be over, and he would rest.
He righted himself, spit out the remnant of mucous from the coughing fit, and stumbled on. Ahead, myriad voices rose in song and all but blotted out the vibration of the chant from the church. He staggered once, then shook his head, spit again, and hurried forward. There was little time.
Tommy and Elspeth marched Katrina through the church, one on each of her arms.
She had taken only a couple of steps inside before the horror of what she'd stumbled into flashed to life in her mind. She screamed, but her voice was lost in the low chant, caught and buffeted about like a badminton birdie.
Snakes slid around her feet, and she danced over them, fighting not to let them touch her.
She saw them ripple up and around Tommy's leg, and then Elspeth's, but they avoided her.
Once or twice she saw one draw up and back, as if it would strike at her, but each time her captors brushed the serpent aside at the last second. They moved steadily through the center of the congregation.
About halfway down the aisle she quit struggling and concentrated on getting through and past this room. All around her people swayed and sang. Their bodies were draped with serpents. Their faces were pale, and in the sickly green light that glowed from the very walls of the church, she saw that each and every one of them had the identical dark mark on their forehead. With so many snakes in view, it became apparent what the squiggle represented.
She glanced up toward the front of the church, and screamed again. Any hope that the two holding her by the arms were trying to get her to Abraham faded in that instant.
She recognized the man standing, arms raised to the ceiling, chanting into the crowed. It was Silas Greene, the same man who'd stepped from the general store with a wide smile on his face and a hand outstretched in greeting just before she was yanked inside, bound and carted off. At the same time, it was not that man at all.
There was another figure slightly offset and standing directly behind Silas Greene. That figure was human from the floor to a point about three feet above Silas' head.
Beyond that, broad shadow-shoulders stretched up toward the rafters. The head mounted between those shoulders reminded her of a huge deer, or an elk, and above it all, stretching into and beyond the confines of the lofty, raftered ceiling, were thick black antlers.
Shadows dripped from the thing, and every time Silas moved his arm, or his head, that shadow mirrored the motion.
That huge, ponderous head turned to her, and eyes blazed in its depths. From the tops of the antlers, green stringy lichen dangled, sprouting from the wood of the church walls and dripping down from above. Silas saw her, as well, and he smiled.
He winked, but she was beyond thought, screaming over and over, lending her voice to the cacophonic sound of the congregation's voices.
At the rear of the church, her captors stopped, just for a moment, and turned her slowly.
She tried to fight their hold, but it was relentless. The man reached over and put his hand under her chin. He lifted her face so she fell directly into the crazed, hollow eyes of the thing above the door in the front. Katrina saw eyes as dark and bottomless as chasms drilled back into the wood. She saw the thick ropes of hair carved from unknown wood in an undetermined time, stretching into the walls and shaking the building on its foundation. She felt the hungry draw, the devouring power of the thing. Then she felt nothing. She dropped into darkness, falling to her knees and kept from the floor only by Tommy and Elspeth's grip on her arms. They dragged her quietly into the rear chamber. The curtains dropped back into place as they passed, and Silas stepped down from where he stood behind the wooden podium.
He had everything he needed, and there was no purpose to drawing things out. He stared into
entity
eyes and started forward with slow, even steps.
He studied the eyes of his followers, reached out to touch a few as he passed. The serpents were everywhere, more than could possibly have come from the tanks in back. Energy surged all around him.
As he stalked the final steps down the center aisle of the church to the front doors, everything inside followed. It wasn't a group of individuals moving in unison, but a single, fluid entity.
The congregation stood, spun, and filled in behind and around him like the wake behind a boat. Some still wore serpents twined about their arms or throats, and other snakes slid sinuously between their feet, up and around their ankles, all in a constant blur of motion that blended one form to the next.
The effect was of a giant bat flexing its wings.
The bodies stretched down the pews to the walls on both sides, and tendrils of sickly, greenish light, like an intricate network of roots or veins, flickered in the air between those closest to the wood and the wall itself. Life and power flowed from them into the planks and up through the ropy hair to where glaring, hungry eyes watched over it all.
The church surrounded Silas, and he felt the strength of it—the power that drained in both directions, into the walls and floor of the church on one end, and into himself at the other—into the darkness beyond himself that reared back and screamed a silent challenge through the doors and across the grass to the trees. Until he reached the door he wouldn't see what lay beyond, but he felt it.
The darkness inside him felt it, and knew it. The sensation wasn't one of fear, exactly, but there was wariness in it that set Silas's thoughts spinning. It was the first time he'd sensed hesitation since the night in the woods and a stark reminder that, while the darkness rooted inside him might be immortal, he was not.
He relished the challenge. Confrontation was something he'd avoided all his life, a thing he'd feared. Those who bought supplies from him had bullied him. Those who sold him his supplies had cheated him. Everyone he had come into contact with over recent years had talked behind his back, laughed at and ignored him. No more. This was his night, his moment, and despite the fact that it was only the shell of what he'd become that started life as Silas Greene, it was that shell that would play front man to the band.
He swung the doors of the church wide. At that moment, he felt the darkness above him contact the doorframe again and press into the wood. There was a jolt of current, as if he'd completed an electric circuit and used himself as the fuse. He stood very still, arched his back, and screamed. The scream caught itself on the chant and rose. It swelled to enormous volume and became a war cry.
He raised his arms and felt those gathered behind him ripple. He moved through a wave of energy and darkness to stand on the front steps of the church and glare out across the lawn.
Across the way, Abraham stood, surrounded on all sides by faces that watched from the trees and others that crowded in behind. There was a clear demarcation between the five elders, and those who followed them. The five formed an equal armed cross and the light spilling from the lantern in Jacob Carlson's hand shimmered around them like some kind of wild, spiritual Christmas lights, chasing one another in a fluid motion.
Silas blinked. There was something more. Beyond them all, something larger loomed, but the light was too bright for him to make out details. The light flickered, and each time it did, he felt a small pulse up through the soles of his feet. He stepped back closer to the church and put his arms out wide. He wanted as much connection with the structure as possible. She rested just over his head, and the great horned darkness coursed through his veins.
"You are not welcome," Silas boomed.
"Unless you have come to lay down your toys and worship, you are not welcome. Your fathers were not welcome, and you see where their lives have left you. You feel what I've become, and what I can become."
He closed his eyes and reached out with his mind. The thoughts of those who stood across the churchyard were veiled, not open books like those of his followers, but he was able to pluck at them randomly.
He found images, desires, hungers and fears and he magnified them. He found a man who dreamed of one of the women beside him and he conjured an image of that woman, naked before a fire, writhing. He felt the man waver and sent a slap of fear into the woman's face.
She turned, caught her companion's expression, and backed away in sudden terror.