Ancient Eyes

by David Niall Wilson

  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, an
d 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.

  Tommy's face was damp with perspiration and with the clinging moisture that suffused the air. The cup rippled, the spiral at the end of the horn whirled impossibly. He couldn't quite make out the color of it. Designs spun across the polished surface, and something brilliant and glittering winked at him from the rim.

  Tommy shuffled closer and felt the damp soil soak the knees of his jeans. Greene smiled, but it transformed his narrow features into an expression so alien to the shopkeeper's visage that Tommy shook his head slowly back and forth to refocus and bring it into perspective. His thoughts grew slow and thick. He saw the vines rise to circle Greene's form almost entirely. They were thicker, and they trailed down into the Earth and danced about Silas Greene like green, leafy serpents.

  Tommy came within reach, and he felt something grip his hair hard, tilting his head back. The horn was brought to his lips and upended. Hot, slick liquid oozed over the lip of that chalice and down his throat. He fought at first, but he was held easily, and the thick liquid flowed in and down, cutting off his breath completely.

  He arched his body, uncertain if he was fighting against the grip in his hair and his slipping consciousness or diving forward into darkness. The hold in his hair was released, and at the same time the arm supporting him fell away. He toppled backward. The drop to the ground took years, and he didn't feel the impact of his shoulders on the trail, or the crack of his head on a loose stone. He felt nothing, saw nothing, though somehow he was still aware of the sensation of falling. He couldn't focus his vision, but he sensed the sky far above, the branches of the trees with their glowing nimbus of morning sunlight, and those antlers, stretching out and twining with the trees, winding in and up, down and out to encompass the mountain and the stone, the valleys and the rivers.

  Tommy closed his eyes. Things moved around him and over him, things that he knew he should be trying to brush away, but he heard voices as well, and they called his name. The taste of the drink lingered. At the same time that he thought it strange to say so, he knew that it tasted—green. He concentrated on that for a second and the image of sap oozing from a spike driven deep into an ancient oak tree merged with that of small dewdrops falling from the blossoms of flowers so brilliant in hue and heady in scent they swirled his thoughts off and away.

  He saw someone walking, someone smaller than himself, and familiar. It was a girl. Her long dark hair trailed after her and spread out like a cape. She ran, her feet bare and the grass beneath them greener than any he'd ever seen. He knew that hair—knew the face that he would see if she stopped or turned. His heart lurched.

  The green taste became his breath. It permeated his mind and flowed into his limbs. He thought of the girl's face and he grew thick with desire. He shivered, and the sap seeped through his groin and lent its strength to his already painfully hard erection. His hips lifted from the ground, and he tried to call out to the girl, to make her turn and see him, to stop her and draw her back where he could touch her, gaze into her eyes and share the heat and drown himself in her and fill her. He tried to bring her back to where he could see her eyes.

  All the while, a voice whispered in his ear. Most of the words were jumbled and lost—or filed away. He heard the girl's name, Elspeth Carlson; it shivered through him and raised him from the ground again, wiping the next sentences from his conscious thought and dropping him back into the stream of sound around some bend. He knew that name, had breathed it into the darkness more than once and dreamed it into his life, despite the unlikelihood of such an event ever transpiring.

  The girl disappeared into the distance; her image dissolved into the trees and the branches. The sunlight was warm, and he felt wind on the damp, chill sweat that coated his face. He could not breathe—felt as if he had not breathed since that horn cup had been held to his lips and tilted. In that instant, he saw the old church; its faded walls gleamed white and its steeple jutted into the sky, a sharp, one-finger salute to Heaven.

  Tommy gasped air through the thick, sticky mess that filled his throat and coughed violently. His hands dropped to the ground at his sides and he dug his fingers into the dirt, dragged his nails deeper and gripped until his knuckles threatened to pop through the skin or explode from the pressure. He coughed again and bile-coated chunks spewed from his mouth in a stream. His head pounded. He tasted sweet air and dragged it into his lungs in great heaving gulps. He lay flat on his back, fighting for the breath he'd been denied before passing out.

  In those moments, he saw how death could come without warning. He would not die this time, but this was a wake-up call. You could drive down the mountain, park your truck, walk into the woods and die. It was that simple.

  As his breathing steadied, his awareness of his surroundings returned. He felt the press of grass and dried leaves against his back and the knot where he'd cracked his head on the rock. He heard the chirruping cry of crickets in the shadows and the flapping of wings overhead. The sun was not as bright as it should be, and for a moment he thought there would be a storm. Then he lifted his arm and glanced at his watch, and sat upright as though stung by a hornet.

  The quick motion was a mistake, and vertigo struck hard. He leaned forward and placed his head between his knees. His mind whirled. It was after six in the evening. When he and Angel had come down the mountain, it had only been one o'clock.

  Angel.

  He turned, but Angel was not beside him on the ground, or anywhere in sight. Shadows encroached on the path from all sides, and only the slightest hint of sunlight glowed about the trees. Tommy scanned the trail, and the trees beyond it, but there was no sign of Silas Greene, or of antlers. The thick, ropy vines that had erupted from the earth were nowhere in evidence, and the ground where Greene would have stood, if he'd been there at all, was as undisturbed as any other patch of trail in sight.

  He found his hat on the ground at his side, lifted it and brushed the dirt from it carefully before sliding it back onto his head. His throat hurt like hell, and there was an awful, bitter taste in his mouth. He'd tried an acorn when he was much younger, not listening to his father's warning about the taste. This was like that, only worse, so bitter that even the act of trying to spit it out drew new spasms of disgust. At the same time, he felt the ghost flicker of desire sizzle down the back of his throat. Elspeth Carlson's face flashed through his thoughts, and then was gone.

  He rolled back to his knees and stumbled to his feet, brushing the grass and dirt from his clothing absently. He couldn't remember exactly what had happened, but he knew what he had to do. He turned toward Greene's store and the parking lot beyond.

  As he walked, he brought back the fleeting images of Elspeth Carlson. The bitter taste in his mouth tingled and his jeans felt very tight. Tommy shook his head and tried to concentrate on something other than long dark hair and longer legs. He broke through the trees and rounded the building at a trot.

  He'd been afraid he would find himself abandoned, Angel long gone and a five mile hike back up the mountain still in front of him, but the truck was there, right where they'd parked it. He caught sight of a quick burst of flame, and knew Angel had lit a cigarette and was waiting.

  Tommy rounded the truck and slid into the seat beside his brother, who turned the ignition key the moment they were both seated. Without a word, Angel flipped on the headlights, backed out of the small parking lot in a whirl of dust, and turned the nose of the truck down the lower fork of the road toward the base of the mountain, and the city of San Valencez.

  Tommy didn't ask where they were going; he knew. Their father was not going to be happy about them taking off in the truck, but somehow Tommy understood that things were different now. What Pa wanted had always been law, but laws change, and there had definitely been a sh
ift on the mountain.

  Remembering something, like a long-forgotten dream rising to the surface of his mind, he slid his hand into his pocket. There was a crumpled paper there, and he pulled it out, almost groaning as his fingers brushed against his throbbing erection.

  He smoothed the paper on his thigh. There was a lot of work to do, and not a lot of time to do it. The list was a start.

  In silence, the truck wound down and away from Silas Greene's store. Behind them, Silas stood in the doorway and watched until their taillights had rounded a bend, far below, and slipped out of sight. Turning and opening the door to his store, Silas did the same.

  FOUR

  Irma Creed lay alone in her bed, wrapped tightly in her shabby sheets and a quilt her mother had given her. She stared at the lone window straight into the face of the nearly full moon. She saw the tops of the trees and the higher peaks beyond her own. She had her Bible open and leaning against her bony knees. One hand rested on top of the pages to hold the book open to the words she was no longer reading. Her forehead ached. She wanted to touch it. She wanted to soak it in cold water and soothe the pain. She wanted to take so many pain-killing pills that she would forget. Except she wouldn't. Of all the many things Irma knew, this was most certain. She would never forget what ached on her forehead. Her free hand, the one not resting on the Bible, inched closer to her thigh and she trembled. Her hand slid closer still, the nail of her thumb brushed against her skin and her face flushed with heat. There was a scent in the air, deep and damp, like the loamy earth beneath a tall pine after a summer rain. She thought of droplets of sap bursting through the bark and the strength of the trunk, shooting into the sky in defiance of the heavens. The scent filled her mind and she pressed her palm so hard into the pages of the Bible that her knees nearly buckled from the strain. She tore her gaze from the window and stared at the pages before her, the bright, white paper and the beautiful, close-set words. The pages were illuminated, and since she could not clear her mind enough to read, she studied the designs and ran her gaze up and down the intricate scrolls and images of angels with swords and trumpets. Sweat dripped from her chin and dampened the sheets of her bed, and the tremble became a shaking that made her gasp aloud with its intensity.