by Неизвестный
Why do they burn us? They want to banish the dark.
And Moom thinks, “But I am the dark. I give life in the dark. What comes from me, comes from there. Babies come from the dark!”
The voice of Grape: “I'm waiting for you, Amanda. This time you will not wander the underworld. You're coming home.”
“Stop that heathen muttering. I warned you, no witch spells'”
She felt her soul gathering the memories it would take on its journey, pausing at the door that leads out of the body.
“Goddess,” she whispered, “open it fast once the fire starts. Please don't let me suffer long.”
He twisted his leash tighter around her wrists. Her hands bulged from the pressure. For a time she was silent. A moan escaped on an exhaled breath. The next one became a sob. “You killed a child, Simon. But you can atone, even for that. I can help you atone.”
“I am not guilty! Before God, praise His Name, I am not!”
He looked at her, into her eyes. “Could you really help me?”
“Of course I could. Of course!”
The torment of the leash grew less. By the Goddess he was letting her go. Then he sighed a long sigh, tightened the leash again, and laid her face-up in the dry brush and sticks.
Her disappointment made her burst into tears. Through her own suffering, though, she kept trying to understand him, to find the insight that was the key to his need. He wanted her help, she could see that. Why wouldn't he allow himself to accept it?
Then she saw into the nature of the hell he was inventing for himself. In the heart of his guilt he would be forever devoured. It was surprising that he could not yet see the shadow of his demon, the ghost child, for the more hatred Simon conjured in himself the more real she became. From all around them there came the scuttling of Abadon's long, jointed legs.
He was the first human being she had encountered who had condemned himself to the eternal hell.
Tom hovered just at the horizon, huge in the mountains, his black shape like a cloud along the ridges. He gazed at her with fixed intensity.
Amanda kept on trying to reach Simon. “The child will let you atone.”
He peered down into her face. There was a distinct odor of pizza on his breath. “I'm sorry I did it. I just—all of a sudden, she touched me and it felt too good, and all of a sudden—oh. God, she was just lyin' there dead. A kid and dead.”
He clasped his hands together and looked into Amanda's eyes. His essence seemed to call out to her, “Help me, don't let me do this to myself. Help me!”
The clicking of Abadon's pincers mingled with the windclatter of the rowan's limbs.
Amanda's tight-bound arms hurt so terribly that she had to force herself not to bellow. There was only one way for her to save herself: she had to save this man.
“I cut off her hands and tossed her in a river. I couldn't have any ID. But I'm sorry, damned sorry.” Even his sorrow was ugly.
“You don't have to endure your guilt. You can relieve it if you've got the courage.”
“I'm so scared,” he whispered. “I deserve eternal damnation for what I did.”
“You deserve what you choose to deserve. Your guilt can end, Simon. Untie me and we'll talk.”
For some time he didn't move. At least there was a struggle going on in him, or so it appeared.
She kept hoping, but when finally he met her eyes, the pity she saw filled her with despair. He would not look so sorrowful if he had decided to set her free. “You're right to think this is hard for me. I don't enjoy making people suffer, in fact I'd like nothing better than to let you free. But I'd be 'doing a real sin then. You need the suffering I'm going to give you. I'll spare you God's fire by burning you in mine. You see, you don't understand that this is a good deed I'm doing. When you're dead and in heaven you'll thank me. Fifteen minutes of torment will save you from an eternity of spiritual fire.”
With a little, fascinated smile on his face, he began to spark his cigarette lighter. Amanda turned away. Her stomach churned, her womb contracted around the tiny life within.
She thought of the Covenstead. This was to be their last Samhain, then. Where had they erred? Why had the powers abandoned them?
With a click and an orange flicker, then another click, Simon got his lighter gomg He cradled the whipping flame in his hands, then applied it to some dry leaves at the edge of her pyre.
“I'll pray with you as long as I can.”
“Put it out!”
“As the fire burneth, let her soul be cleansed, O Lord.”
She tried to roll away but she couldn't. She twisted and groaned. Remembering Marian's death, she concentrated on the sky. Summer is waiting, she told herself. The flames rose from blue to orange and began to dance in the wind. When the first heat touched her, the fire was perhaps three inches from her thigh.
The little girl came close then. It was amazing that Simon could not yet see her. Amanda looked right at her. Her eyes were so stilt, so knowing, so very angry. By moonlight Amanda could see the freckles on her nose.
“You think you're going to hell, don't you, Simon? You think there's no way out for you. There is a way out.”
A flicker of interest registered in Simon's eyes.
The fire came closer He tightened his leash until she thought her arms would break. She began to cough in the tangy smoke. She could see coals raging in the center of the spreading flames. Sparks flew to the sky when she struggled.
“Simon! The Lord wants you in heaven. He wants everybody, doesn't he?”
The heal was rising fast.
“O Lord, on behalf of this your daughter I ask mercy and forgiveness in this time of her agony. Let your purifying fire cleanse her of the sins of the earth.”
Tom paced just beyond the circle of firelight. She screamed at him. “Please help me!”
Simon licked dry lips. His eyes reflected the fire. The heat against her thigh was becoming a torment. Her clothes were smoking. Simon had started to shake.
“You ask God to forgive me, but you're the one who needs forgiveness. You're the sinner here, Simon. The hand is proof of that.”
“I am the light—”
“You're no better than the rest of us! Scared and guilty and lost. Now put out this fire and rejoin the human race.”
“I killed her. I admit it, sure I do. I confess it. But what's the good, she's still dead.”
“Worse sins have been forgiven. If you have courage, you can atone—oh, for the love of all that's holy I'm catching on fire!”
The wind was making the fire caress her hip. “I beg you, I beg you, please stop!”
“I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!”
Miserably Amanda writhed. There must be some way to reach this man. “Oh, please!” In another moment the flames were going to cover her.
Simon's face in the firelight was that of a little boy.
She squirmed, she kicked, she shrieked.
Watching her, his expression changed. There came into it a glimmer of something she hadn't seen there before, that might be remorse. “The hand is—”
“Guilt. Your guilt. But you can atone for your crime. I can show you how!” The flames were licking along her leg.
“I can't! I can't ever atone!”
“Put the fire out! That's a start.”
The flames spread to her shirt.
“Oh, put it out! Put it out!”
He was divided, his hands alternately reaching for her then pulling away. The heat was starting to drive him back.
“You'd be free, Simon! Free of your guilt!” Her body wanted to give up to the maddening anguish of the fire, but she had to keep trying. “Think of it, Simon. All these years you haven't slept a peaceful night! You could, Simon, you ir could have peace!”
“O God—” He burst into tears. Then he was moving, he was coming forward, his hand shielding his face, and suddenly the leash was loose and she was able to leap up, to roll, to free herself.
Pain boiled in her chest and leg bu
t it had worked. She was free, she was not being burned anymore and Simon Pierce was kneeling among the broken coals, fumbling in his pocket, then bringing out something small and strange, the hand, dead but splotched with areas of living skin.
He held it cupped in his two palms.
Amanda backed away, for something beyond conception was happening beside him. The air filled with a sighing sound as of a thousand children murmuring for home, as by threads and tatters a girl of twelve spun into final, true, and absolute reality.
A small, dark shape scuttled toward the rowan. Fairy were here, maybe even the Leannan.
The girl reached out and took the hand from Simon. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, Betty. Oh, no.”
The girl twirled in the firelight. Her hands, both attached again, were spread wide. She was not smiling.
“You've got to forgive me, darlin'. It was one of those crimes of passion, like they say. But you're dead, darlin'. Please, I don't want to see you like this! You're dead.”
A great roar of wind came sweeping out of the sky and with it a raging, furious voice screaming every foul word in every language of man.
The murdered child's fury slammed across the landscape, echoing from valley to valley. Simon cringed before her, who bellowed loud enough to break rock.
Then silence came again, filled only by his shaking breaths. “She's the Devil! Lord, O Lord, she's the Devil come after me!”
“I'm not the Devil,” she said. “I loved you, I really did.” She drew his face up by the chin, making him meet her eyes.
Amanda could see Abadon hiding in the body of the child, ready to burst out and grab him and drag him down. She had to help him. “You're guilty, but not eternally guilty, Simon! Nobody is eternally guilty.”
There came a ringing as of great bells back in the chambers of me mountains. With each tintinnabulation a flock of unlived days fluttered by on moth's wings. The life that the girl had been denied, the nights exquisite, the wearing days, the hard incredible pain of birthing, me old shadow again and the reaped field of experience, all came up and sank back again, dissolving into a powder of shadows.
Simon saw what he had denied her, and Abadon began to flex in her body. “She'll have another life, many lives. She has time.” He sank down, he covered his head, he made a long sound beyond a sob. “Betty,” he whispered, “Betty, Betty, Betty. I can't give you back your life, Betty. I can't give you back what I took.”
“Simon, think how many others have taken lives. Millions. You aren't alone and you don't deserve eternal damnation for it. Accept your guilt and atone, but don't pretend it's worse than it is.”
“Atone? My atonement is hell eternal.”
“Your atonement is what satisfies her, and she won't keep you for all eternity. You are not that bad.”
He looked at Amanda with gratitude, and in that moment Amanda knew that he had accepted that his own guilt had limits.
From the shadows came a strange fairy music, not the harp, but a harsher sound as if of drums and bells and rattling stalks. This music made Simon look curiously in the direction of the rowan.
But there was nothing to be seen, not to his untrained eye. Amanda saw it all, though.
He gasped. A shaking hand went up to touch his hair as his gun, forgotten, clattered to the ground. Off in the dark the fairy musicians pointed horns at him. They did not make a sound that could be heard, but Amanda could feel it in the air all around her. Simon put his hands to his ears and crumpled forward. Rendered white and narrow as silk, his hair fell away.
He uttered a sound like wind spending itself. His flesh sloughed from his bones, his fingernails grew long. His eyes sank, his hands became crone claws.
Amanda remembered him at the Tabernacle, pointing and shouting a terrible sentence from the Book of Revelation. She spoke aloud, but her voice was small: “And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name is Abadon.”
The horns made great brown noises, which sucked the youth from him. He fell forward, already little more than a terribly aged skeleton.
The girl murmured a pitying word and caught him, cradling him in her arms. There was something like satisfaction in her face. Her overseeing his hell would in the end relieve the suffering of them both, her anger and his guilt.
Amanda could hear the snap of his skeletal jaw, a noise no bigger than somebody clicking the teeth of a comb.
The girl carried her burden away across the Fairy Stone, in among the crowd of fairy that lined the far ridge of me mountain.
When Tom came bounding up at last, Amanda at first wanted to greet him, then felt anger as sharp as cut glass. “You old cat, why didn't you help me?” She looked out into the dark, at the departing shadows of the fairy. “And you, why did you wait so long!”
She knew, of course. They had not been able to do anything to Brother Pierce as long as he wanted eternal damnation, for they could not be a part of his hate. It was ironic that his own self-loathing protected him from his destruction. As soon as he found the least glimpse of his good core, though, he could not condemn himself for eternity. Then they could become a part of his justice.
Amanda followed the progress of the girl climbing into the mountains, still carrying her burden. As they went, the giri changed. She became like smoke, men more solid, until she was the Leannan sweeping through the heights and glens, carrying an extraordinarily shrunken man in her arms.
When she realized that the ghost child had also been the Queen of the Fairy, she knew that the last test was over. They had all been tempered in the Leannan's terrible fire. The strength and wisdom Amanda had been given were her weapons against the coming age of persecution, of which Brother Pierce was only the beginning.
She began making her way down the mountain, thinking of the other witches. Her injuries made her progress slow, and as she moved along, she heard gunfire and the roaring of some great animal, shouts and finally screams as high as wind in wire. Pain or no pain, there was only one thing for her to do. She leaped ahead, rushing along the rough path as fast as she could. Her injuries screamed, almost rendering her insensible, but she ran on.
She looked around for Tom, who had been slinking ahead hrough the undergrowth. “Help us,” she screamed. “Help us!” He was nowhere to be seen.
Terrible imaginings of the murder of her people swam through her mind, of Kate being shot, of Robin burning and Ivy burning and all the Covenstead in ruins, of animals kicking at fire in their stalls.
By me time she entered the village her head was crashing with pain and exhaustion. She needed medical attention, and soon.
An awful silence had settled on the Covenstead. The village stood in darkness, in shadows. She saw nobody. She went close to the barn.
A faint sound came from within—singing, low and sad. The people were alive, at least. But their tone said all: they were preparing to die.
She peered down the pathway between the cottages. Where Brother Pierce's men? There wasn't a soul around.
Then she noticed Tom. He crouched low, facing the shadows beside the sweat lodge. He was huge, and amazingly terrifying, a great, black lion with a flowing mane and golden eyes. He was the size of a car. Huddled before him were Brother Pierce's men.
Tom yawned. Nearby the Leannan's harp began to play. It was odd, to think of her at once back on the mountain with Simon, playing her harp m these shadows, and stalking about as Tom. Amanda loved the Leannan Sidhe, and the warmth in her heart made the music grow sweeter. Is it that God is lonely? Is that why we exist?
Amanda saw what had happened here. Their usefulness expended, the Leannan could have taken Brother Pierce's men, too. Or could she? Maybe she had not the right; maybe it was not their time to die.
Tom gazed at Amanda and swished his broken tail. His pink tongue appeared for a moment between his teeth, and he licked his whiskered cheeks. She picked up a discarded 30-30, found it to be empty, and tr
ied a shotgun. It had two shells left. When she pointed it at Pierce's silent, staring men, Tom leaped up in a shower of sparks and became a cat again. Then he closed his eyes and soon was purring the first purr she had ever heard from him.
She threw open the door of the bam with a shout of joy. “We're free! We've won!” Robin swept her into his arms.
There followed a time of people holding one another close, joyous in their lives but remembering their dead. Sheriff Williams was called, and Brother Pierce's men were led off to the county jail.
The silence of the night engulfed the village and soon brought rest to the exhausted little group.
As far as Brother Pierce himself was concerned, a search was mounted for him the next day by the sheriff's office and the state police. Nothing was found, not so much as a discarded gum wrapper. Over subsequent weeks wells were sounded, Maywell Pond was dragged, and the mountains were walked.
Tom would scamper along with the searchers, his tail bobbing in the tail grass, his good ear pricked to any sound. But nothing was ever heard, nothing found. Simon Pierce was never seen again.
[1] Have no idea at all what it is about.