So Silas stayed close, kept his fingers wrapped tightly in his mother's coat, and held his silence. The woods were different on Sundays. Any other time when the families gathered you heard screaming children, laughing women and catcalls among the men. Sunday it was as silent as a funeral—and to Silas, who had attended two funerals in his nine years of life—it was very much the same.
They stepped out of the line of trees and saw other families trudge slowly through the wide-open front doors of the church. Without a word, Silas' father stepped into the rear of the line, and they shuffled inside. Reverend Kotz stood to one side of the door, smiling his too-wide smile with his too-white teeth, his suit so dark that if you stood him in front of midnight he'd show up as a shadow. His hair, just as dark, was combed back carefully, and as he greeted each family with a handshake on their arrival, something seemed to pass from their hands to his—some spark of energy, or life that they'd brought with them into the woods, but would never see again.
Silas' family took seats near the center of the church. Reverend Kotz had left his post at the door and strode purposefully up the center aisle without a glance to either side. Silas stole a quick look over his shoulder, and he shuddered. If he had been allowed to bet, he might have bet that the good Reverend felt the glare of the thing that lived above the door boring through the back of his skull. Everyone felt it, though no one spoke of it. Silas had asked his mother, one time, what it was, and why it was there, but his only answer had been a reproachful, almost fearful glare, and he had never mentioned it again.
Now, as he remembered this, Silas saw to his horror that Reverend Kotz stopped, stood very still, and turned. The man glanced over his shoulder, directly into Silas' terrified eyes, and in that instant, Silas knew the man had heard his thoughts. Kotz released Silas from his gaze and turned to smile up at the recessed alcove above the rear door. Then he turned back toward the altar and the curtains beyond. The entire exchange happened so quickly that Silas could not tell if it had happened at all. His parents gave no sign that they had noticed the Reverend's attention, and the man already stood beyond his wooden podium, searching the doors and the assemblage for any stragglers foolish enough to enter the church beyond the appointed time.
Silas shook his head, blinked back a sudden rush of tears, and lowered his head. All around him families shuffled their feet, Sunday dresses rustled and men cleared their throats nervously while trying to remain as silent and still as stone. No one wanted to be the one to catch Reverend Kotz's attention. No one wanted their lives, or their deeds dragged into the sermon, or a blemish on the marker they would ante up for the salvation of their soul. No one wanted to face the pool. You could hear the water, if everyone was silent. It sloshed a little against the edges of the tank. You could hear other things too. The baptismal pool was not the only thing behind that curtain, and they all knew it. While they were frightened, they were also expectant. The longer Reverend Kotz stared out over them, the deeper that expectation became. The nervous drumming of hands and feet ceased. Their breathing slowed, and lips parted, tongues licked at the dry, cotton-flavored fear that coated their lips and choked their throats. Sweat beaded on their skin and ran in dark rivulets down the men's starched white collars.
Silas glanced at his mother and saw her eyes upturned to the altar, her chin jutted out slightly. Her hands were clasped on top of her purse, white-gloved and dainty, but gripping one another with such pressure that Silas cringed. She didn't even know he was there. None of them saw one another, but only that man in the front of the church, glaring at them with the wrath of God himself sparking in his eyes.
Silas had seen something similar one other time, and he drifted into the memory—anything to keep him from glancing up at the altar. He had seen the faces of those who spent too much time meeting Reverend Kotz's eyes, and he had seen those who went to the pool. Those who were cleansed would never meet his eyes fully, and when he spoke to them, even the children, they lowered their gaze and hurried off as if he might learn a secret they didn't want him to have—or see something they were too ashamed of to share.
On the night he was thinking of, his father had taken him down the road to the Cooper's barn at dusk. His mother hadn't wanted him to go, but Silas' father was not a man to let his woman make decisions for him. The men had gathered and were drinking. A circle had been dug in the center of the barn's floor. It dropped off about three feet from the ground level, and the men were gathered around it, laughing and talking excitedly.
It was a cockfight, the first and last Silas had ever seen. The birds were penned on opposite sides of the pit. Silas' father found room for the two of them to the left of a great white rooster with flecks of brown and gold peppering his feathers. The animal was beautiful at first, but when you got too close you saw its eyes. They were shining, solid marbles of glittering darkness, fierce and angry beyond measure. The bird was fitted with fighting spurs—wickedly curved metal blades that enhanced its already dangerous legs.
The birds were bad, but the worst was the men. The closer they came to the moment of the contest, the thicker, hotter, and more difficult to breathe the air became. Everything slowed to a surreal blur, bright white bulging eyes glared and stared and droplets of sweat were flung with every motion. Silas' father was no exception, and though it frightened him, Silas himself was slowly drawn into the dark web of their excitement.
They slid the pens to the edge of the pit, and the men jeered at the handlers as the birds lunged, trying to draw first blood on the men who would cast them into the pit before the battle was joined. The laughter had a sharp, cutting quality, and though they all waited breathlessly for the birds to be released, Silas knew there was a lust for blood to be drawn, even if it came from the handlers.
It was then that Silas looked up and met the eyes that stared back at him from across the pit. They were concentrated, ignoring the others surrounding them, and paying no attention to the cocks in their rickety pens. The Reverend Kotz held Silas easily in the ice of his glare, and then threw back his head and laughed.
The sound of that laughter rose above the voices of the other men. It echoed from the walls, reverberated and grew in volume and strength. Silas forgot the pit, his father, the others—everything but those eyes, and that laughter, drawing him in. The Reverend's lips moved and formed words Silas couldn't make out, and the man stretched out one long, almost skeletally thin arm, beckoning.
Silas trembled, tried to press back and away, but bodies on all sides penned him in. To his left a large bony farmer pressed close, and on the right Silas' father leaned into the pit, oblivious to his son's churning backward steps, driving back against him in a frantic effort to cut through the pack. Silas fought, but the power of Reverend Kotz's eyes compelled him. The words the man spoke and that Silas could not hear took on grave importance. He had to know them, to hear them and make them his own. It was important.
He took a step forward. He reached out his hand. The sound around him had ceased to register in his mind. The faces, the voices, everything but Reverend Kotz's face, and the voice he could not make out, disappeared in the bright lights. He had to get closer. One more step, maybe two and…
The world dropped away. Silas screamed, and suddenly the others were there again, their voices, their guttural screams. A huge, meaty hand gripped Silas suddenly by the hair and he was yanked backward. He toppled toward the ground, and they made way grudgingly to let him pass—and fall. Eyes glared at him from all sides, voices cried out, and in the background he heard the shrill screeching of the cocks.
They closed in before him and cut him off from the sound and the pit. He lay there for what seemed hours, but couldn't have been more than a moment or two. The dust of the old barn's floor rose about him in choking clouds and his head rang from connecting with the floor.
A roar of sound rose, and he remembered what he'd seen in the cock's eyes—knew that something momentous was taking place, and that he was missing it. The eyes shifted in his mind to
those of Reverend Kotz, and he rolled to the side, retched, and staggered to his feet. He wanted to see—to know what was happening.
There was no way to force his way through, but Silas found that he was able to pry a small crack between his father's legs, ignoring the danger of being trampled. The edge of the pit was only a few inches away, and he crawled to it, raised himself from the billowing dust and peered over the edge.
The white rooster had fallen. It lay in a bloody heap in the center of the pit. A rust colored bird with blood dripping from its beak strutted around the fallen warrior, ready to raise its crowing voice to the heavens and proclaim victory.
Then it happened. In a split second, the universe shifted. The white bird, half-dead in the dirt, lashed out with one leg in a lightning blur of violence that was so quick, so sudden, and so final that Silas only realized he was holding his breath when his eyes watered from the exertion and his arms trembled from the effort of holding him off the ground.
The blade strapped to the rooster's spur slashed cleanly across the other bird's throat, stopping him mid-strut with a squawk of dismay that liquefied to a gurgle. The rust colored bird dropped dead as a stone, and the white bird limped in a slow circle, leaned on its broken wing and ruined leg and kicked up tiny puffs of dust with the one good leg. The silence was as thick as the sound had been, thicker, perhaps, suffused with shock.
Then the bird screamed, and that sound released them from their thrall. It wasn't just Silas holding his breath. No one in the room had moved since the white bird struck. No jokes, or laughter, nothing but the clean and poignant visage of sudden death. Mortality was a palpable weight on their shoulders, pressing against their lungs and holding all sound in check.
Silas crawled quickly backward, avoiding the legs and boots, avoiding the almost violent attempts by the men in the room to reassert themselves in a universe that had just given them a wakeup call from hell. They were louder than they had been. Their laughter was forced, and their motions were jerky—too fast and too harsh. The excitement had drained from the place with the spilling of the cock's blood, and it wasn't coming back this night no matter how long or loud they called out to it.
Silas scanned the men's faces and clothing, but he saw no sign of Reverend Kotz. Had the man slipped away, or had he ever really been there? A few moments later, his father broke from the crowd and came to stand over him.
"What were you doing up there, boy?" he asked gruffly. "If I hadn't grabbed you…"
The rest of whatever his father imagined might have happened if Silas had toppled into the pit remained unspoken. Silas said nothing. He rose, and the two of them turned away and slipped into the night. They said nothing of what had happened to Silas' mother, and he had never told a soul the story himself. But he remembered the eyes. He remembered the angry, tear out your throat eyes of that white rooster, and he remembered Reverend Kotz, whispering to him across the void of that pit.
The symbolism had been lost on him at the time. He as too young to find the image of the Reverend Kotz leaning out over a pit to call him across meaningful. He was not too young to understand that if he'd gone to that reaching hand, he would have fallen. He was also not too young to know that the glittering eyes that had glared at him with such intensity would have filled with satisfaction if it had come to pass.
So when the Reverend had turned, just for that instant, and stared at Silas, pinning his thin, bony frame to the wooden pew with the simple force of that single moment of recognition, he thought immediately of dust and blood and slashing blades. All eyes were on Reverend Kotz, and on the curtain behind his back.
"Praise Jesus," the Reverend said. The words were spoken softly, but they rang through the high wooden rafters. The silence they were spoken into was so profound that the tiniest breath of a word thundered and crashed through their minds.
"Praise Jesus, for he has forgiven our sin." Silence. "Let us pray."
Silas shook his head and dislodged the memory, for the moment. He turned away from the baptismal pool and its slithering brood. He strode from the alcove with long, purposeful strides, passed down the aisle between the pews, hesitated just a moment to stare at the seat where he'd sat so long ago, then turned and stepped to the doorway.
A storm had risen that whipped hard rain across the trail and bent trees to its whim. Silas stood for a moment in the doorway and stared into the darkness. There would be no moon, and no light. It was cold, wet, and miserable.
He cocked his head, as if listening for something, and frowned slightly. Someone was out there. Some thing that he should recognize, but couldn't quite lay a finger on. Then it was gone. With a final glance over his shoulder into the church, Silas stepped into the storm and disappeared among the trees.
Lightning strobed in the sky. By the third flash, he was gone.
THREE
Angel and Tommy Murphy pulled up in front of Silas Greene's store and sat, staring at the dark windows and the locked door. The old pickup they drove muttered and coughed, idling roughly; the scent of burning oil hung heavy in the air.
Angel flipped off the ignition, and they sat in silence.
Tommy had a shapeless hat pulled down over his brow. Unruly bangs shot out from beneath that reached nearly to his heavy eyebrows. He opened the passenger side door and slipped out into the road without a word. There wasn't really a parking lot, more of an indentation in the trees that lined the rough road leading out of town. It was long enough so that four vehicles parked nose-in to the trees could fit without blocking the road. In all the years of his life, Tommy had never seen more than two vehicles parked there at one time, and when that had happened, one of the two had been the delivery truck from San Valencez.
There was a porch on the front, and there were a couple of old rocking chairs, but somehow Greene's had never become a place to hang out. If that was what Silas had expected when he put the chairs out, Tommy doubted he felt the same now. Still …
Tommy walked up to the front of the store, cupped his hands against the window in its center, and peered inside. Everything looked as it always looked, jumbles and piles haphazardly strewn across a few handmade shelves. There were crates in the corners, and the cooler hummed away behind the last aisle. There was the shadowed recess of the door leading to Greene's "office" in the rear, and the counter where he collected money. Nothing had changed, and still a chill rippled down Tommy's spine. He took a final look around, and shook his head. No one was in there, or if they were, they weren't looking for company. He started to tell this to Angel, but he only made half of the turn. His gaze fastened on the path that led into the forest beyond the store. Lines of shadow crossed and re-crossed the trail, an intricate maze of branches; but Tommy knew they weren't branches. He'd seen them before. His hand rose unbidden to his forehead and his fingers slipped through the greasy bangs to brush rough skin. He knew the mark was there, though he bore no scar. He felt the swirl of it seeping down through his thoughts and imbedding in his brain, and now it throbbed with a white cold, the fiery caress of ice.
To his left, he heard Angel slam the door of the truck. He didn't know if his brother had seen, but he knew what he felt. Angel wore a red bandana with stained paisley designs rippling across it. He always boasted it was the same as the one in the song Bobby McGee, but Tommy knew the truth of it. The closest Angel had come to that song was a stretched and worn cassette tape they played endlessly, and the nearest the two of them had been to the rhythmic slapping of windshield wipers was the once-a-month supply run to San Valencez in their truck. Now that bandana covered a mark so similar to Tommy's own that they might have been traced from a stencil.
Angel stepped up beside him, but neither of them turned. They were both mesmerized by the play of shadows. Without a word, they stepped forward and started down the trail. Tommy didn't see it, but Angel was scratching lightly at his forehead. There was nothing in sight ahead, but neither of them hesitated.
The shadows were deeper in the woods than they should have
been, but Tommy barely noticed. He wasn't thinking about the trail, or the trees. He wasn't thinking about Silas Greene, or his store, or about Angel and his bandana. Not really. He was thinking about the bonfire, and the dance, and those antlers. His heart pounded.
Down the trail someone stood waiting for them. The man was alone, and very quiet, and after a few steps Tommy knew him. It was Silas Greene. For a fleeting moment Tommy thought that maybe the man would open the store for them. Maybe they would just pick up the supplies they'd been sent for, and drive back up the mountain to listen to that Janis Joplin tape one last time. Then all thought was gone, and he and Angel stepped close, dropping to their knees in the loamy soil, their eyes locked to Greene's.
The shadow antlers had grown heavier and thicker, so huge and ponderous that they loomed over the old man like a separate entity, a larger, darker being glowering down at them through the lenses of Greene's eyes. They would never have knelt before old Silas, but they knelt before that higher power.
The grass at Greene's feet was thick. It surged, and Tommy gasped as tendrils of greenery burst through the ground, wrapped about Silas' ankles, and snaked their way upward. There was strength in the old man's presence that had never been there before; youth and vigor rippled through his form and seemed ready to burst from him in an explosion of impossible energy.
Silas held something, and as Tommy raised his eyes, he saw that it was a cup carved from a single curving horn that spiraled like the inside of a seashell he'd seen in a schoolbook. A fog rose around the three of them, heavy with moisture and rich with the scent of mud and the cloying perfume of exotic flowers.
A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult Page 400