A thick blanket of ash awaited him at the summit. He surveyed the pit, a barren scar on which the church once stood, and from which nothing would ever grow again. Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped from the tip of his nose. When he turned back to look at his progress, he noted how bald the area was in comparison to the forest. Aside from the grass which blanketed the clearing, no other plants grew there. No weeds or wildflowers.
Rejoice.
Startled, Tyler spun on his heels and looked across the ashen patch. The low sing-song chorus hummed in his ear, the voices positioned next to his head. He’d heard them clear as day, but when he turned, there was no one. He was alone here, alone for miles, and an icy nail scraped slowly down his back as a heart-dropping realization occurred to him: No one knew he was here.
So stupid, he scolded himself. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck. A feeling in his gut urged him to turn around, leave, go now while you can because something is wrong here, Tyler, something is incredibly wrong, and if you don’t go now, something incredibly wrong is going to happen to you—
“Rejoice.”
He heard the chorus this time, not in his head, but here in the physical world. A chorus of voices singing from within the earth. The voices were sweet, lurid, and they wanted him to follow. “Rejoice, for the words are yours. Our ways are yours. Rejoice, our child. Come and see…”
Tyler Booth took two steps toward the center of the ashen pit and felt the ground give way. He had no time to react. The earth collapsed beneath him, and he fell into the dark.
“You’re probably wondering why I was so careless. Truth is, your grandma did warn me about the drop. Hell, I’d even packed rope for the descent, not that it would’ve mattered. There was nothing to anchor myself to anyway. Even all these years later, I can’t tell you why I wandered to the far edge of the ash pit. I knew there was an opening there, but the voices had…an effect on me. They told me to come and see, and I wanted to. I really wanted to. How could something so sweet be so malign? And like sailors to a siren, I went toward them, dumbstruck by what they told me. I stepped on some old charred, rotted timbers and shingling covering the rift and that’s when the world fell away from me.”
Jack shivered. The old professor’s words coaxed a memory to the forefront of his mind, one of descent and cold, of darkness and voices and dim candles spread out along the cavern floor.
“I don’t know how long I was unconscious. Hours, probably. Far longer than I’d planned to be there. When I came to, my whole body ached from the impact, and my head was pounding. Somehow, I’d managed to fall more than twenty feet in a dead drop without breaking anything. I remember thinking, ‘So this is how I die. Alone, in a dark hole, in the middle of nowhere.’ But I was wrong. There was light down in the barrow. And I certainly wasn’t alone.”
Tyler sneezed, his sinuses agitated by the dust and ash in the musty air of the cavern. The pressure in his skull was exquisite, pulsing in time with his heart, hammering against the interior of his forehead and eye sockets. He sat up and cried out in agony. Pain crashed over him in churning waves, and for a time, he remained still, counting the rhythm of his heart and taking slow breaths to calm himself.
He surveyed his surroundings. A halo of light fell from the ceiling in a bright curtain, banishing the darkness to the outer recesses of the room. The depth of the barrow and its hollow nature confused him. This wasn’t a burial mound at all, he realized. This was something else, something that didn’t make sense with his understanding of the local native culture. When the old woman told him there was a burial mound in southeastern Kentucky, he expected something of Adena origin, or maybe even Cherokee, but this wasn’t anything like the mounds left behind by those tribes.
No, this was something he’d never seen before at all. Tyler searched his surroundings for his backpack, wincing at the sharp nails of pain driving into his skull, and felt one of the fabric straps. He pulled the backpack toward him, fumbled in the dark for his flashlight, and clicked on the beam.
Crude stonework supported the outer layers of earth, their asymmetrical shapes held together by a primitive mortar he’d never seen before. The grout between stones was porous, pockmarked with tiny holes and clefts like coral. A viscous black liquid seeped from the openings, covering the stones in a grimy wet sheen. Tyler’s heart climbed into his gullet.
Get a grip on yourself, he thought. He turned away from the nearby wall and slowly, painfully, rose to his feet. A spell of vertigo struck him when he stood, but he found his bearings a few seconds later. The room ceased its spinning, but the air—no, the fabric of reality—continued to breathe, swelling in and out before him, and he thought he heard the thrum and drop of a heartbeat reverberating from somewhere in the dark.
Tyler dismissed the sound, certain he was hearing his own terrified heart and steadied the flashlight as he set off to explore. A narrow pillar of earth stood near the center of the room, with stone stairs leading to its summit. To the side of the steps sat a stone altar covered in soot. The whole floor was covered in dirt and ash, mounds of it some places, and nearly bare in others, revealing more of the primitive stonework inches beneath his feet. He spotted the buried legs of an old aluminum extension ladder and felt a rush of relief wash over him. At least he’d have a way out of this place—but not yet. He wasn’t done here yet.
Along the far wall, the stones were covered in strange glyphs, but he couldn’t make them out in the dim light.
He took a step. Something crunched beneath his sneaker.
Confused, Tyler shifted the beam to his feet and stepped back. There were bits of stone in the mound of earth beneath him. He traced the tip of his shoe into the mound, seeking the hardened thing he’d cracked with his weight. There it was, something pale and brittle, something—
Oh God.
The femur was small, belonging to a child of no more than five or six years. Tyler stared at it for a long time, fixated on the contours of those brittle remains and the implications they posed. What the hell was this place? A primitive abattoir, built for the purpose of human sacrifice?
His mind raced with questions, seeking answers where there were none. This place defied known record. The cultures that had inhabited this area thousands of years ago all buried their dead in mounds, sure, but they weren’t known to sacrifice their own. And if they hadn’t built this place, then who?
A soft voice whispered from the shadows beyond the altar.
Our prophet is sleeping, child. Would you baptize yourself in the blood of midnight and become an infant in his cosmic womb? Would you seek rebirth in his court of bones and serve on your knees in a palace of fire?
Fear seized him. He pivoted on his heels, searching the room for a person, a shape, anything to explain the voice whispering in his ear. Those weren’t his words, the voice in his head was not his conscience.
A sickening glow pulsed from beyond the altar, bathing the room in sapphire. The grip of fear slackened, and he found the will to move his feet, stepping carefully through the mounds of ash surrounding the stone altar. There was something buried on the other side of the structure, something emanating a blue light, illuminating the carvings and drawings along the stone walls.
Illuminating an opening in the wall itself.
“I don’t remember if the doorway was there before. It was all so dark, my mind was waging a war between terror and curiosity, and the throbbing in my head made it hard to focus on any one thing for long. All I can tell you is it might’ve been there before, or maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know.”
Jack nodded, flipping through the pages of his grandmother’s notebook. He found the old Polaroid photo, pushed it across the table, and averted his eyes. Looking at it for too long made his forehead throb.
Dr. Booth glanced at the photo, nodded, and closed the book. He pinched the bridge of his nose and winced. “I took that, just before I dug out the glowing thing in the dirt. The idol your grandmother wanted. I should’ve charged her more than a thous
and dollars. I should’ve said no in the first place.”
The Polaroid flash lit up the cavern, and for a split-second, he glimpsed the room in totality, a dome framed in old stones covered in writing carved a millennium before. Maybe even longer.
He didn’t wait for the photo to develop. Instead, he shoved the camera and photo print into his backpack and moved to the other side of the altar. A driving desire to leave this place clung to him, eroding any resolve he had to document everything, and—
All thought ceased when he spotted the open passageway in the wall.
In his younger days, even just five years before, he might’ve ventured through the dark doorway, but not now. Staring at the opening, at the way light retreated from its corridor, he was filled with a terror he’d never experienced before. The sort of terror that makes one’s gut drop to their feet, their blood run cold, their mind seize like a corroded engine. It was the kind of terror born from facing the impossible, the unnatural, and knowing what one is seeing simply cannot be.
And the opening, whether it was there before or not, filled him with a horrific leaden sensation in his belly. However deep he was inside the bowels of Calvary Hill wasn’t deep enough to accommodate such a passage, for its ceiling would break the surface of the earth beyond the hillside. What he saw mere feet away was impossible—and yet there it stood, taunting him, beckoning to him.
Would you explore us, child?
Would you baptize yourself in the blood of midnight?
Would you kneel before a throne of fire?
Tyler’s head swam as he stuck his hand into the earth and retrieved the glowing object. It was as Imogene described: a rough stone carving in the shape of a grinning figure. The figure was cold and stung his flesh. He shoved it into his backpack, teetering on the heels of his feet as the world swirled around him. A moment later, he steadied himself, and gave one final glance toward the impossible doorway.
There were stars in the darkness. Bright blue stars lining the stone walls of a hallway, stretching into the vast darkness of the cosmos. Because it was the cosmos—a shimmering tapestry of stars and galaxies, the cold uncaring vacuum of space framed here in this place that should not be. The universe illuminated a grotto at the end of the corridor, with large porous walls climbing into the twilit abyss above. Black ichor seeped from the wounds in the stone, trickling down the sheer rock walls into a lake below. He heard the lazy slapping of waves against an impossible shoreline, pulled forward by an unnatural gravity down here in the earth.
And in the brief instance when he glimpsed the twilit grotto, Tyler was filled with a maddening epiphany that would haunt him in the years to come: Those aren’t stars. Oh God, they’re eyes.
As if they’d heard his panicked thought, the stars blinked and twitched erratically, all turning to focus upon this stranger at their threshold. A low groan erupted from beyond the lapping waves.
We see you, child. Do not take what does not belong to you.
Tears streamed from Tyler’s cheeks. He scrambled to the ladder, dragging it up the steps of the earthen pillar, crying out as he banged his shin against one of the metal legs. His heart hammered in his chest as he set the ladder against the opening in the ceiling. He was halfway up before he looked back, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The passage was gone, replaced by a darkening void spilling over the floor like a rich oil seeping up from the earth. A moment later, the room was coated in darkness. Even the failing sunlight from above cast no glare on the surface. What light fell upon the dark was consumed in a liquid nothingness.
Tyler Booth scrambled out of the opening and onto the ashen summit of Calvary Hill. He stumbled as he raced down the slope, rolling to a painful stop at the tree line. Pain shot up through his ankle, but the dull throbbing in his head finally began to abate. Exhausted, the fear draining from him in beads of acrid sweat, Tyler leaned against a nearby tree and sobbed.
5
Jack watched as the old man wiped his eyes with shivering, gnarled hands. Dr. Booth had finished off the bottle of rum, but even the alcohol wasn’t enough to quiet the tremors. The men sat in silence for a few minutes, the professor collecting himself after reliving such a horrible experience, and Jack wrestling with the sudden guilt of asking Tyler to do so.
“I’m sorry,” Jack whispered. “I had no idea…”
Except he did have an idea. Those voices down in the dark, the carvings on the wall, the grotto beneath a sky full of eyes—weren’t these the very things of his nightmares? Had he not built a career from mining the horrible images embedded from years of childhood trauma? What the professor described was the very setting of Midnight Baptism.
“It’s no matter,” Tyler mumbled. “She paid me to do it. I didn’t have to, but I—well, money is money. That says it all right there. I delivered as promised. When the college went belly up the following year, I took the opportunity to retire. But…” The old man’s voice hung in his throat with a dry croak as he considered his words. “…but that place still haunted me. In my dreams. Even now, Mr. Tremly, I can’t sleep a wink without visiting that awful place. That’s why…”
He gestured to the window, and then at the various masks and effigies hanging along the walls of the house.
“Did my grandmother ever say why she wanted the idol?”
Tyler thought for a moment and then nodded. “She did say one thing. The day I returned with the idol, she mentioned something about ‘breaking a curse,’ but when I asked her to repeat herself, she told me it was nothing. After the hell I’d gone through, I’d already decided then and there not to press further. I didn’t want to know.” The professor met Jack’s gaze with heavy eyes. “I still don’t want to.”
Jack caught his drift and nodded slowly. He checked his watch and smiled. “Well, Dr. Booth, I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. Before I go, I do have one more question.”
“Shoot.”
“Does the phrase ‘As above, so below’ mean anything to you?”
“As a matter of fact, it does. It’s an old Hermetic saying. It implies balance. As things are in the heavens, so shall they be here on earth. Or some horseshit like that.”
“Hermetic?”
“Well, yes. I’m far from a scholar on the occult, but after what happened, I did a fair bit of research to…well, protect myself. From whatever it was down there. You understand.”
Jack nodded. He did, in a weird sort of way. Instead of speaking, he opened his grandmother’s notebook and flipped to the page with the symbols he’d seen on her gravestone.
“What about these? Do these mean anything?”
Dr. Booth studied them, his eyes dancing excitedly from one glyph to the next, and Jack saw the spark was still there. The desire for knowledge, for understanding another fragment of the greater human puzzle. And then the spark was gone again, the light fading from the old man’s eyes.
“No,” Tyler whispered. “I’ve never seen them before.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Tyler said, smiling. He looked over his shoulder at the kitchen clock. “Listen, I hate to be rude, but I have some errands I have to run.”
Jack smiled, held up his hand. “No, it’s okay. I need to be going.”
The old professor saw him to the door and watched as Jack walked to his car. Before Jack climbed inside, he turned back and said, “Hey, Doc?”
“Yes?”
“If you were to ever get the itch to figure out what those symbols mean, it would be a great deal of help to me. I’d pay you, even.”
Tyler smiled but waved him away. “I appreciate that, son, but like I said before, I’d rather not know.”
Jack nodded. “I get it,” he said, “but…well, they’re etched into my mamaw’s gravestone. I’d just like to know what they mean.”
“Maybe you aren’t meant to,” Tyler said. “Have a good afternoon, son.”
The old man closed the door. Jack walked back to his car, puzzled by the afternoon’s revelations.
What were you up to, Mamaw? He climbed into the car and started the engine. What curse were you trying to break?
6
Dr. Tyler Booth watched from behind the curtains as the car backed out of his driveway and sped off. He remained there even after the young man was out of sight.
“Why’d you lie to Genie’s grandson,” he muttered to no one. The empty house said nothing in reply, offering only the subdued gesture of a ticking clock from the kitchen. His many totems looked on from their resting places along the walls, their faces slack, lifeless, and free of judgment.
Because, he thought, she was trying to save him from that mess. Save us all, for that matter.
Tyler stepped away from the window, wincing at the stiffness in his knees. There was moisture in the air, maybe even rain on the way, and the ache in his joints sang a chorus in its honor. He left the living room and walked down the hall to his bedroom. There, he closed the door and reclined on his bed. He leaned over and took hold of a framed photograph on the nightstand.
The photo had aged, but the two smiling faces had not. They were forever preserved behind glass. He looked at his younger self, just ten years ago now, with his arm around the lady he loved. There was a moment, earlier in his life, when he thought he’d missed his chance at finding someone with whom he could spend the rest of his days. Maybe he was too dull, too unattractive, and too odd in his ways.
Imogene Tremly proved him wrong. He’d delighted in aiding her in her grim quest, if for no other reason than it brought them together. But now she was gone, her quest unfulfilled, and if what she believed proved to be true, then there would be hell to pay. By everyone.
You should’ve helped him, he scolded himself. For Genie’s sake.
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