What happened next was like something out of a nightmare, in which everything happened in slow motion. Hallie, watching, felt rooted to the ground, unable to move.
She saw Elder Sidlaw bend over and pick up something that was propped against the barricade. A rifle? No, maybe a shotgun. It was hard to tell at this distance and in the dark.
Adam made a strange sound in the back of his throat. Like an animal caught in a trap. For the moment, he seemed as incapable of movement as Hallie.
The other man turned abruptly and ran over to the shadows beside the road. Was that Brother William? There was something familiar about the way he stood and walked. Something about the way he held his head, chin down and hunched between his shoulders. And it looked like his Model T Ford parked behind the barricade.
Suddenly Hallie found herself staring into the twin beams of the old car’s headlights.
She watched, wide eyed and trembling, as Elder Sidlaw, followed by Brother William, advanced toward them with leveled shotguns. They obviously meant business.
“Are they going to sh-shoot us, Adam?” Hallie could barely control the trembling of her voice.
“No. They’re going to take us back to Holyoake,” Adam said. “And that’s even worse.” Galvanized into sudden action by the thought, Adam grabbed Hallie with one hand and Becky with the other. “Come on!”
He yanked them off the road and into the woods. “Come on! We’ve got to run for it!”
Once away from the lights of Brother William’s Model T, Hallie felt as if she’d gone blind. The trees reached up and knitted their boughs together beneath the moon, allowing no light to shine through.
They plunged forward, the three of them, through the black velvet darkness, Adam in the lead. Hallie tripped over a fallen branch and fell down, but Adam jerked her to her feet again without even stopping. Unseen brambles tore at their clothing, and branches caught in their hair. Oddly enough, there was no sound of pursuit. No yelling by Elder Sidlaw and Brother William.
Hallie could hear Becky stumbling along behind, Adam dragging her, and the little sobbing breaths she was taking.
It isn’t really Becky’s fault we’ve been spotted, Hallie told herself. She couldn’t help herself. She’s been hypnotized, or drugged, or something.
At last, a little light trickled down through the interlaced branches. Enough light for Hallie to see Adam run into a thick branch that hung chest high and fall to the ground.
Hallie dropped to her knees beside him. “Adam! Are you all right?”
Just then they heard the boom of a gun. Three shots. A pause. Then three more shots. The sound came from behind them, on the road.
“What’s that? What are they shooting at?”
“Oh, hell,” Adam said, clutching his chest. “They’re signaling those crazy villagers. Now they’ll all be on our tails!”
“They’ll have lanterns, too,” Hallie said. “The whole village will be after us. We’ve got to get out of here. Now!”
“The stream,” Adam said. “We’ve got to find the stream and follow it. It’s our only chance.”
“Do you remember the map?” Hallie asked. “Wasn’t the stream around here somewhere?”
“Finding it in the dark will be like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Adam. He rose to his feet. “Where’s Becky?”
“She’s over there by the tree,” Hallie told him. “I don’t know what’s the matter with her now. She’s kind of gone limp.”
Adam groaned. “What next?”
Hallie tried to pull Becky to her feet, but her friend resisted. “You’ve got to walk, Becky. Won’t you? For me?”
“No.” Becky’s voice sounded like that of someone under hypnosis. “I want to listen to the water.”
Hallie crouched beside her and grabbed her shoulders. “Get up, Becky. Haven’t you caused enough trouble for—What did you say? What water?”
The gun sounded again from the road. Three times. A pause. Then three more times.
“There they go again,” Adam said. “Come on, let’s move out while we can.”
Hallie shook Becky—not hard, but Becky’s head wobbled on her shoulders like a rag doll’s.
“What water, Becky?”
“Over there,” Becky responded dreamily. “Up ahead.”
“Adam! Becky says the stream is up ahead!”
Rays of moonlight shone fitfully through the branches of the trees. In the far distance they could hear voices rising and falling.
“They’ve heard the shots. They know something’s wrong,” Hallie cried. “Come on, Becky, be a good girl. You’ve got to stand up and walk. Can you do that? Can you do that for Hallie?”
Becky didn’t answer.
“Help me, Adam,” Hallie begged.
The gun fired again. Three times. Pause. Repeat.
Together Adam and Hallie managed to drag Becky to her feet. Becky seemed to weigh a ton. She was deadweight. Hallie shuddered at the thought of the word dead. If they had to carry Becky, they’d never make it through the woods, stream or no stream.
“Listen to me, Becky,” Hallie said desperately. “We’re going to find the water and walk beside it. Won’t that be nice?”
“Oh, all right,” Becky said, suddenly agreeable and lively, as if she’d just been given a shot of adrenaline. She wriggled free of Hallie’s hands. “Let’s go find the nice water.”
The herbs Mrs. Grigsby had fed Becky, Hallie reflected, seemed to work in spurts. First Becky would be lethargic. Then animated. If they could only keep her on her feet and moving until they got over the mountains!
Becky seemed to know where she was going, because she struck out immediately, rapidly, through the trees—surprisingly surefooted, in spite of the dark and the uneven terrain.
“Hurry up, Adam,” Hallie urged. “We can’t lose her.”
They followed close behind, within touching distance of Becky, stepping carefully over the crackling underbrush and pushing aside over hanging branches. Sometimes they could see where they were going, sometimes not, but Becky seemed guided by an internal radar. She appeared able to hear the water, even though the others couldn’t. Hallie wondered if the drug she was on had made her hearing supersensitive.
Then Hallie heard it, too. The sound of running water.
“She’s done it, Adam! She’s found the stream!”
They stepped out of the trees into a clearing. Unobstructed, the full moon shone down on the water that swirled and bubbled over dark rocks.
“Simon said to follow it upstream,” Hallie said. “It will lead us to that trail over the mountains he told us about.”
Adam cocked his head, listening. “Brother William’s blowing his car horn. Hear it?”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s probably letting everyone know where he is. That’s smart. They’ll start looking for us at the spot where we left the road. Then they’ll all spread out into the woods. We’ve got to keep ahead of them, Hallie.”
In her mind’s eye, Hallie saw the entire village, armed and carrying torches, combing the woods for them. Could she and Adam and Becky outrun them? Even if they made it to the mountain path, what then? Could they manage to evade the villagers long enough to make it to the next town?
Yes. They had to. The people of Holyoake would never let them tell the world about all the sick things that went on in their evil, corrupt little village. Those people were playing for keeps.
But what if they do catch us? Hallie asked herself.
Then they mustn’t discover Simon’s part in this. As long as he’s still free, maybe he can do something.
They had to drag Becky from her spot next to the stream, promising her that the stream grew prettier and more bubbly farther on, in order to get her moving again.
They moved along the muddy, slippery bank as rapidly as they dared, keeping clear of the trees and aided by the moonlight. Hallie lost her footing once, and plunged down the short incline into the stream. It was only a matter of a lo
st minute or two, but it left her wet and shaken.
Every now and then they’d stop and listen for pursuing villagers. They could hear trampling and shouting behind them in the woods, but from the sound of things, they had a good head start, and they kept up the pace in order to widen the gap between them and their pursuers.
The stream wound and looped through the woods.
“I think we must be roughly parallel with the road now,” Adam said at one point, when it seemed as if they’d been running forever.
“How close are we?” Hallie asked breathlessly. “What if they come straight through from the road and find us?”
“I don’t think they expect us to be where we are, Hallie. They probably think we went deep into the woods at the point where we ran off the road. We wouldn’t have known about the stream if Simon hadn’t told us, right? They must figure we don’t know where we are and that we’re back there fumbling around in the dark.”
“Then maybe we have a better chance than we thought,” Hallie said. “How much farther do you think it is to the mountain trail?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to judge distance the way the stream loops and bends. Can you keep moving this fast? What about Becky? Does she seem okay to you?”
“She isn’t saying anything, but she doesn’t act tired.” Hallie regretted having to talk about Becky as if she weren’t there. But she wasn’t—not mentally, anyway.
“I haven’t heard the villagers for a long time, have you? No shouting.” Adam sounded out of breath. Hallie knew they were all running on pure adrenaline.
“No,” Hallie told him. “I haven’t heard anything either.” She would have added that the silence bothered her. That it was almost too good to be true. But she needed to save her breath. Besides, why worry him?
“If someone’s following us, we’d have seen them or heard them by now,” Adam said. “They’re a noisy bunch, and they’d have closed in on us long ago. We’re going to make it, Hallie. Once we get on that mountain trail, we can keep to the underbrush. We ought to get to that little town Simon told us about before dawn.”
Hallie tried to see her watch in the moonlight but couldn’t. She figured that dawn couldn’t be more than three hours away. In three hours they’d be safe. The nightmare would be over.
Just three more hours. When the sun comes up, we’ll be drinking coffee in some nice little police station in a nice little all-American town. And then we’ll come back to Holyoake with every police officer in the state and rescue Simon.
“There’s the road we have to cross up ahead,” Adam said, drawing Hallie and Becky back into the shelter of a clump of trees. “There, where the stream goes through the culvert, see?”
The road looked deserted, but they waited, watching, to make sure it was safe. Once they left the cover of the trees, they would be in plain sight until they reached the woods on the opposite side of the road.
“Wait until that cloud passes in front of the moon,” Adam whispered. “Then we’ll run across.”
The cloud was shaped like an old Spanish galleon, and it sailed boldly across the face of the moon, blotting out the light. The road was plunged into darkness, and Adam and Hallie held tight to Becky’s hands as they ran swiftly and silently over the uneven surface of the old country road.
And then the night was pierced with javelins of light, as what looked like half the people of Holyoake stepped out of the woods and surrounded Adam, Hallie, and Becky.
Chapter EIGHTEEN
“You were right, Vicar,” said a triumphant voice. “They did just what you said they would.”
More lights were emerging from the woods. More people encircling the three teens. Hallie, in a state of shock, found herself staring at them dazedly, unblinkingly, wondering where they had all come from.
The vicar stepped forward. In the dancing beams of the many flashlights, his pale face and white hair made him look spectral, like a creature from another time and place.
“There’s no escape, you know. No running away,” he told Hallie and Adam. “Surely you didn’t think you could evade your fate. The fate that The Goddess has, in her infinite wisdom, arranged for you.”
Adam glanced around frantically, as if looking for a way out, a hole in the crowd through which they could bolt, but the encircling villagers only pressed closer, shoulder to shoulder, cutting off any chance of escape. They all smiled diabolically, gloating over their victims.
Hallie knew how a rabbit must feel when surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves. These people were all but licking their lips!
“How’d you get here?” Adam demanded. “We thought you were behind us in the woods.”
“We’ve been right here, waiting for you,” the vicar replied smugly. “A few of our people have been following you quietly, but the rest of us were here, preparing a warm welcome for you.”
He smiled unpleasantly. Even from where she stood, three or four feet away from him, Hallie could smell his stale, sour breath. Was everything in this town rotten and unclean?
“It was easier this way, you see,” the vicar explained. “Oh, we could have chased you through the woods, adding to the drama of your pathetic escape attempt, but that would have been predictable. Vulgar. Offensive to The Goddess. When we found your footprints by the creek, we knew immediately that you would try to follow it upstream in a foolish attempt to get over the mountains. And that you would have to cross the road at this point.”
Then he added with a sneer, “So we let you think you’d lost us, and you fell right into our trap. How stupid you were to think you could outrun us when we’ve lived here for nearly three hundred years! We know every inch of this land.”
Yes, we were stupid, Hallie thought. Stupid to believe we were actually escaping this evil place. We’ve been doomed, right from the start. And now Becky will be their Fire Maiden for sure.
She glanced quickly around the crowd. Simon wasn’t there. Nor was Mrs. Grigsby. Where were they? Had Mrs. Grigsby suspected her nephew’s part in all this? Was she at home, guarding him? Was Simon as doomed as they were?
The vicar turned his head and made a slight signal to Elder Sidlaw, who was standing beside him. The elder nodded, glanced over at Becky and, in turn, signaled almost imperceptibly to Brother William.
The two men moved forward silently until they were standing, one on either side of Becky. Then they each took an elbow and began to steer her through the crowd, which parted respectfully before them.
Becky, who had been silent up to now, suddenly became vocal.
“I don’t want to go with you!” she protested, stopping dead in her tracks. “Let go of my arms. I want to stay with my friends.”
“Where are you taking her?” Adam demanded, trying to push his way through the resisting crowd. “Let her go!”
“Now, Adam,” the vicar said soothingly. “Surely you don’t think we’d allow our lovely little Fire Maiden to remain with you. She must be prepared for tomorrow’s ceremony.”
“Ceremony? I know what you’re planning to do with her!” Adam shouted. “And if you think you can commit a crime like that—”
“But it isn’t a crime,” the vicar responded piously. “It’s a holy sacrifice. The will of The Goddess.”
Again Adam tried to break through the crowd, to reach Becky, but two men grabbed him from behind, pinioning his arms. His frantic struggles to free himself only made them tighten their hold on him, bending him back in a painful arch. Then someone came forward with several lengths of rope, and the two men quickly tied Adam’s legs together, then his arms.
“Becky!” Adam called helplessly.
One of the men threw a beefy arm around Adam’s neck. Adam coughed and choked, unable to speak.
“Please don’t take Becky!” Hallie begged the vicar. “Please!”
Becky stretched out an arm to her friends. “I want to go with them,” she told her captors.
The vicar ignored Hallie and Adam and spoke directly to Becky. His tone of voice was that
of someone speaking to a very young and not-too-bright child.
“Now, now, my dear, we’re only taking you back to Mrs. Grigsby. You remember Mrs. Grigsby, don’t you?” He accented the name both times, pausing to note Becky’s reaction.
“Mrs. Grigsby?” Becky asked, dropping her arm. A dull, placid look came over her face. “Mrs. Grigsby?” she asked again.
“Yes, Mrs. Grigsby. She’s waiting for you, and she’s quite worried about you,” the vicar said. “And she’s very, very hurt, because you ran away without even saying good-bye. She’s waiting at the Place of Worship.”
“No!” Hallie shouted, throwing herself at the vicar and trying to hit him with her clenched fists. “No! Not that terrible place! I saw the font with the bloodstains!”
Reverend Thoreson managed to push her away and signaled angrily to Norman, who rushed forward, grabbed her arms, and yanked her backward.
“Shall I tie her up, too?” Norman asked the vicar. He seemed eager for the job.
Slimy little scumbag, Hallie thought, kicking him in the ankle.
Norman grunted and twisted her arm viciously. “She’s a wild one,” he said. “I could hogtie her.”
The vicar shook his head regretfully. “No. No ropes on that one. The Goddess does not like us to bruise those whom we plan to destroy for Her sake. We already have one who is slightly damaged.” He indicated Adam, who was struggling against his bonds. “So just hold the girl tight for now.”
The headlights of a car lit up the road.
“Ah, here’s your transportation back to the village,” Reverend Thoreson told Becky. “And you’ll like the driver. It’s Sister Evans. You’ll find her quite inspiring.”
Becky only stared at him blankly, uncomprehendingly.
The car, an elderly Chevrolet sedan, pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Sister Evans leaned across the passenger’s seat and threw open the door. The interior light flashed on. She was a thin, bitter-faced woman with an unpleasant smile.
“Ah, Sister Evans,” said Reverend Thoreson. “And not a moment too soon.”
He waved Becky toward the car. Elder Sidlaw and Brother William escorted her through the crowd and gently helped her into the back seat. Then Brother William entered the car on Becky’s left side, while Elder Sidlaw crawled in on the right. Becky was flanked on both sides. It would have been impossible for her to escape now, even if she’d been in any state to try. She sank back in the seat, looking straight ahead.
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