The red church (38 page)

The mudstack trembled, dropping bits of itself on the dais. The tiny clods writhed like worms on the blotched dark angel that stained the boards.

"Sacrifice is the currency of God," it said. "And Ronnie is the sacrifice."

"I won't let you kill him," Linda said.

The thing gurgled a laugh. "Oh,
I'm
not going to kill him.
You
are. That's what sacrifice is all about. Blessings are better given than received."

Linda looked at her son, whose eyes were wet with tears.

"Mom?" Ronnie whispered. He gulped.

Frank fought the strange gravity that wrapped him like a thick skin. He could kill it. Sure, he was of the old families. He had a right. It was his job.

"Do it," Sheila whispered in his ear, a little too gleefully.

Frank remembered how the rifle butt had seem-ingly passed through her cheek, how she had been underwater for far too long. How she recited Archer's words in a chilling and worshipful way. He glanced back at her. For just a moment, so briefly that before this recent madness he would have chalked it up to illusion, she wore Archer's eyes, deep and brown and brimming with secrets. She blinked them back to blue.

"You heard what Samuel said," she whispered, her eyes never leaving the quivering pile of clay. Her doting eyes, her eyes hot with a faraway and deep and inhuman love. A fervor that went beyond the flesh. She was Archer's now.

Frank's throat tightened.

They were all Archer's. They always had been. Frank had tasted, and found it sweet. He had swal-lowed his way into the red church and he had let the monster into his heart. And he hated his own weak-ness almost as much as he hated Archer.

Yes, he could kill it.

But as his finger tightened on the trigger, the mud rippled again and shrank. Samuel stood before him with pleading eyes.

"You can do it, Frankie," his dead brother said. The boy pulled a worm from his mouth and held it up. It squirmed between white fingers.

Samuel put the worm back in his mouth and chewed noisily. "Archer ate me, you know. He eats all of us."

Then Samuel blossomed hideously into the mass of putrid clay.

Archer
wanted
to be killed.

As if somehow being killed by one of his own would give him great power. Just as Judas had given up Jesus. The sons of God always needed a betrayer. Even though Frank no longer believed in God, it was just the sort of logic that ruled in an insane universe.

And he wouldn't obey. He wouldn't give Archer what he—or
it,
whatever it was—wanted most of all. Frank wouldn't make the sacrifice.

He dropped the rifle and it clattered across the hard floor.

The thing let out a damp moan, its thick arms reaching for Ronnie.

TWENTY-FOUR

Mama Bet gazed up at the thing she had made, birthed, delivered unto the world. A flawless monstrosity.

Her perfect, sinless child.

She reached out and touched the moist clay. This was the flesh of her flesh. Had she ever dreamed she would be part of something so glorious, so big?

And I done it all by myself. I brung it out myself, taught my Archer all about the wicked ways of the world, about
the evil of the old families. I passed down the story of Wendell McFall, about how preaching was in the blood, how
it was Archer's job to bring salvation to these heathen Jesus follow-ers.
She slid her hand down the slope of the mud shape. Dimly, she heard Archer's golden-throated voice demanding the Day child.

Let them be cleansed, young and old. Then, when we're done with the Days and the Mathesons and the Potters,
we can go on to bigger work. Because Jesus is legion. A whole lot of hearts got to be plucked out of tainted chests.
A whole heap of iniquities got to be paid for.

The Archer-mud shook and became the boy, the one whose corpse she had dug up and pickled and then canned in glass jars so that young Archer could have offerings throughout the year. There had been other corpses along the way
,
a Day here, another Lit-tlefield there, the whole graveyard like a fresh, sacred garden. Even the embalmed ones were worthy.

But getting them fresh was so much better.

The cold mockery of flesh rippled again and changed back into the mud shape.

The rifle that the sheriff had been carrying landed on the floor beside her. The sheriff was weak. That was just like a Littlefield, to fold like an accordion when there was work to be done. Well, he'd get his in due time.

Mama Bet sank her fingers into the mud and pulled a clump free. She put it to her face and rubbed it over the blood that had coagulated on her cheeks. Her boy. Her son and savior. She pressed it against her lips, savoring the humus, this flesh of the earth. It was between her lips, her tongue probing the holy matter, when she recognized the texture. She froze. That night.

Nearly forty years ago.

When she gave away her virginity and took the seed.

And she remembered how, the next day, she'd found the stone rolled away, the stone that sealed off the hole in the back of the pantry. The hole that led down into the dark, moist tunnels of hell. The clay squirmed between her gums. She tried to spit it out, but it thrust toward the opening of her throat, wriggling toward her belly.

As its rank flavor flooded her mouth, she tasted the bitter truth.

It wasn't God that had impregnated her.

It was . . .
this.

No.

Archer was her flesh, her body, her blood. He was born of the heavens, not the earth. Not like this thing.

But this
was
Archer. Her only son.

The word made flesh.

The flesh made mud, from that which crawled up through deep holes in the ground. How could she ever have loved this thing?

This
thing
that walked among humans like some gift from above, throwing off lies and laying out tricks that made Jesus look like a two-bit street magician.

This thing that stood at the pulpit, slick and foul and throwing off a fungal rotten smell. The odor of the grave.

A deceiver.

Just another in a long line of false prophets and God-pretenders.

May God forgive me, I helped it. I gave it life.

She clamped her legs together, as if she could change the past and keep the thing's head from ap-pearing, to prevent its birth. But it was too late. It had always been too late. The McFall secret was even more secret than she had known.

The thing, the hideous coalition of accumulated sin and pain and sorrow, moved toward Linda and Ronnie.

It wanted a last supper.

Mama Bet looked at the thing that was its own father
,
the thing that had fooled her more deeply than it had fooled anyone
,
and anger burned her from the inside out. It began in her chest
,
where the small clump of mud had lodged
,
and expanded out to her skin. Her head felt as if it were glowing, as if some power from beyond had lit her hair like a torch.

Strength flooded her aged limbs, a strength born of self-loathing.

Sacrifice was the currency of God.

And damned if she didn't know what sacrifice was all about.

Ronnie stepped in front of his mother, protecting her, though the creepy mountain of mud was the worst nightmare ever made.

Mom tried to pull him back, but he shrugged her hands away. "I got to do this, Mom," he said, trying to keep his voice from cracking, but failing.

"No, Ronnie," she said.

"If I give myself to it, maybe that will be enough. That's all it wants."
So I hope and pray. Because if it takes me in, and I
'm
full of Jesus, then it will be filled with
Jesus, too.

Though Ronnie's vision blurred with tears, he knew he was doing the right thing. After all those sins of the heart, all those selfish things, this was something he could do for the whole world. He would give himself so that the world could live. And if Mom loved him enough, she would give him up, too. His heart, which had been shriveled with fear, now felt light and warm in his chest. A strange calmness came over him. This thing could eat him, smother him, rip him apart, whatever it wanted to do, but it could never touch the
real
him.

The part of him that floated in his heart.

With Jesus.

Because Jesus was there, all right, big and happy and brave. Jesus had always been there, only Ronnie realized sometimes you couldn't see Him because you got caught up in your own little sorrows and wor-ries and dreams. All your little selfish things.

But Jesus stuck right there with you, no matter what.

And Ronnie knew that Jesus wouldn't step in and save him from the monster.

Because Jesus had already saved him.

He twisted away from Mom and stepped forward to meet the monster's embrace, a smile on his face, the pain in his nose and heart now as far away as heaven was near.

Mama Bet picked up the rifle.

She had no doubt that Archer could die,
would
die. And only she, who had given it life, could free it. Hers was the greatest sacrifice, after all. She was giving up her only begotten son. Her cataracted eyes fixed upon the mass of mud that was only inches from taking the boy. Sure, that boy deserved cleansing—he had that aw-ful and tainted Day blood in him—but the sins of the old families were nothing next to the blasphem-ing joke of an angel that slopped before her. Angels didn't fall from heaven. They rose up from the meat of the earth.

Her guts ached at the thought that this
thing
had been harbored in her belly, had grown by sapping her strength, had come forth under the lie of a mir-acle.

"Archer," she called with all the strength she could muster. Her diabetic limbs trembled as she aimed the rifle. The mud shape turned, its slab of face rip-pling. The mud changed, slid into Archer's human features.

"Mother?" he said, eyes wide and pleading and oh so damned innocent. Like he'd never had a nasty thought in his life. Like God was the one lighting up his eyes, a holy filament burning inside that glorious
,
handsome head.

Mama Bet wavered. She'd suckled this thing. She'd told it bedtime stories. She'd fed it from a hundred worthless sinners. Why
,
surely there was
one
good thing about it, one thing worth a mother's love.

"Archer," she whispered. The rifle tilted down to-ward the floor, and she saw the dark stain moving
,
rising up like a fat and sinuous snake, draping Archer like an oversize shadow. Something else moved out of the corner of Mama Bet's eye—the sheriff jump-ing over the railing.

"The Bell Monster," Ronnie screamed.

The Bell Monster.

The
real
evil.

Because evil didn't wear flesh. Evil didn't
need
sub-stance.

As the black shape settled over Archer and sank into him, soaked through his smooth suit and styled hair, Mama Bet's son smiled at her.

"I love you, Mother," the preacher said, though his teeth said exactly the opposite. His teeth said,
You 're about due for a turn in the of-fering plate, you stupid blind bitch. And let me
tell you something: you 're worse than all the others put together. Be-cause you served me, and you
loved it. You loved having your face pushed into the corrupted flesh of the old families. You
swallowed the body of God like a pig snorting at the trough.

And the horrible truth of it slammed into her like a twenty-pound Bible dropped from the heights of heaven.

She lifted the rifle and pulled the trigger, and the stock kicked against her shoulder as the report bounced off the wooden walls of the red church.

Frank eased over to the railing. The others had forgotten him, all except Archer, who knew every-thing and seemed to always have a gleaming eye on the sheriff. Even in his mud incarnation, the preacher owned the red church.

But when the shadow of the Bell Monster had risen, Frank knew that Archer had always been here, in many forms, troubling the people of Whispering Pines since the first family had settled in these hard hills. Maybe it had been here since the first sun rose. Maybe it was an evil older than hope, older than re-ligion, older than everything that people thought they understood. And since Frank no longer believed in God, he no longer believed in the devil, either.

Those things didn't matter. Who cared about some nameless, faceless eternity? What counted was that he could save Ronnie, right here and right now. Frank had failed Samuel, but maybe this was a chance at redemption.

The sheriff jumped over the rail and grabbed the boy, lifted him and carried him away from the preacher. Archer didn't even glance at them, his hands spread wide in acceptance as he spoke to his mother. Linda stood in shock at the edge of the altar, slowly shaking her head as if someone had told her that the emperor had no clothes, and she had just noticed the nakedness.

Shoot it.

Frank couldn't kill it, because that would only bring the thing back, more powerful than ever. But Mama Bet was its creator, in a way. At least in the human way. If the Archer-shadow-thing was an ancient evil, it must have started somewhere. And ev-erything that had a beginning also had an end. Ronnie was light in the sheriffs arms as they fled from the altar and down the aisle. Sheila, or whatever Sheila had been, was gone. Frank thought of her touch, but only briefly. He was getting better at for-getting.