Ancient Eyes

by David Niall Wilson

  "It has been too long since we have gathered," Silas continued. "The sins of the mountain have piled so high they threaten to drown us in darkness. Our fathers knew how to combat that darkness…how to sate its hunger. They knew where their allegiance belonged, and they knew the price of redemption. We have not paid that price in a very long time, and the mountain screams for redemption."

  There was a soft murmur. No one spoke, but they breathed sounds that blended and shifted about their feet, as if groping for coherence and falling short. Silas felt the energy in the room slip up a notch, but he held his elation in check. They sat in cold, lifeless pews, but Silas felt the hum of their energy escaping through the soles of their feet and sparking across the wood planks to rise through him. He felt the darkness shimmer overhead as impossibly large shadow antlers flickered just beyond sight. He sensed their presence, and he knew that those gathered sensed it as well. Some might even see it, though what they saw would be colored by their own beliefs and memories.

  Some saw a large, serpentine form writhing behind Silas and rising to the raftered ceiling. Others saw a larger version of Silas, arms spread wide and shadows dripping off him like a long cloak. The rest saw the hint of the antlers, the horned symbol of rebirth. They felt the energy of it flowing in their veins, like the sap in a young tree. It brought hunger that could not be sated, and heat that refused to cool.

  Silas raised his hands over his head and turned slowly. He took them all in, the corners of the room, those squirming in the front row and others cowering in the rear. He hadn't prepared anything to say, but the words came to him easily.

  Those who would assist him knew the parts they would play, as well. He hadn't sat them down and explained it; there were more certain methods of communication. They moved about him, some outside the church, one in the rear near the pool, and still others walking the perimeter of the churchyard. He did not want to be disturbed. Things were moving very quickly. There would be no gradual buildup of power this time. Reverend Kotz had continued what others had begun. There had been other churches built on this spot. She was all that remained. When the white church was erected, the first thing in place when the walls were framed was the alcove. She had watched, even then, every board and every nail connected to her through an intricate skeleton of wood, paint, glass and shadow.

  As he spoke, Silas felt the past leak up through the floorboards and the soles of his shoes. He felt the dirt beneath the foundation, and the stone beneath the dirt. He stared out over the congregation and saw the ghosts of walls long fallen, stone walls that lay much closer to the center. He saw clapboard walls shimmering just beyond the long-fallen stone, and beyond that the walls he knew, the door he had entered through since he was a boy, and her eyes. It all hung in the air before him, connected by lines of green light like a web, sticky and clinging. He expected her to step out onto this web, her carved root hair snaking out like the legs of a huge spider as she approached to devour him.

  The words didn't matter. It wasn't Silas Greene speaking, and the words were not words that he knew, though he knew their power. He knew their source, as well. As powerful as the other was, tucked away in her small cave above the door, there was more. Much more. The darkness that hovered just out of his reach most of the time, teasing him with glimpses of strength and melting him in the heat of its lust. He was a conduit; power flowed in a steady stream from the earth, poured through his slight frame, and sprouted in the huge horned shadows. As he spoke, they solidified. The weight became real even as the strength to bear it rose to the challenge.

  Sometime after he started to speak, three of those in the front row staggered to their feet. They cried out, but the sound was lost.

  They staggered past Silas to the curtained alcove and disappeared from sight as others rose behind them. The third row had come to their feet by the time the first three returned. Their arms were wound about with serpents and their eyes were wild. They didn't walk from the baptismal, they danced; sultry, sinuous steps that rolled their hips and shoulders and drove the heels and toes of their feet into the planks of the floor.

  They slipped past one another, in and out of the room. They didn't return to their seats, but they entered the rows, one after another. Those who were marked bore the serpents and those who were not screamed and tore at their hair. They joined the dance, too terrified to run, but they leaned away from the chosen and slipped into aisles where there were no serpents.

  One man, white-haired and thin as a rail, threw his hands over his head and screeched. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open so wide Silas believed he could see down the man's throat to his soul. He careened out of his aisle, collided with one of the dancers, and turned toward the door. Before he took a step one of the serpents struck. It dangled from the arm of the woman the man had bumped.

  The old man shook his arm where he'd been bit, but before he could free himself, a second snake clamped onto his flailing wrist, and a third curled up around his left leg. It sank its fangs deep into the flesh of his thigh and clung like a limp phallus between his legs.

  The man continued toward the door. He walked in a daze, stumbling and barely able to stay erect. The doorway beckoned, and the sunlight beyond, but with each step he was bitten, and each time he was bitten his steps slowed. Just short of the doorway, beneath the alcove where she watched in dark delight, the man collapsed. He was dragged quickly aside and left beneath one of the pews. The rhythm of the dance did not falter. If anything, the striking snakes and the slow, ponderous steps of their victim lent themselves as counterpoint to the rhythm.

  They formed a corridor. Men and women, children and their parents, and a wall of twining, sliding bodies lined either side of the main aisle. The red carpet that ran down the center of the building looked like a river of blood, and light streaming in through the windows played the shadows of those gathered across that blood in a winding snarl of darkness.

  The door opened slowly, and Tommy Murphy stood there, transfixed by the scene before him. He held a small, struggling form by her hair. When she saw what awaited her inside the church, she screamed; a loud, high-pitched keening that broke through the dark silk of Silas' voice, just for a second. The sound shivered through the room and ricocheted off the walls. It wound in and over Silas's sonorous chant.

  Silas held out a hand to Tommy. It stretched impossibly, a shadow among shadows. He felt ten feet tall, and he sensed each touch as the antlers looming over his head brushed through the rafters of the ceiling. The arm that reached out was his, but there was more, just as there was more to every aspect of him since the ritual and the fire. Some barrier between Silas and another world had been weakened in that fire. Something reached through and manipulated him. It gave him strength and confidence and stole his doubt.

  Tommy hesitated in the door, holding the girl easily, and Silas smiled. "Bring her forth, Brother Murphy," he whispered. "Let the cleansing begin."

  Tommy stood very still and stared into the church. He thought he knew what to expect. He thought Silas had filled his mind with the entirety of the truth. Nothing could have prepared him. He would not have believed the truth, even if Silas had pounded the images one by one into his mind like mental stakes.

  He watched the swaying forms to either side of the main aisle weave back and forth. Snakes hung from every limb, twined about their necks and rose from their hair. Face down on the carpet before him, an old man lay very still. Serpents writhed and squirmed over that inert form as if it were part of the floor, and no one paid the old man the slightest attention.

  Tommy remembered a story he'd been forced to read in school that had given him nightmares. There had been a woman with snakes for hair that turned a man to stone if he stared too long. Tommy had been eleven when he read the story. He'd dreamed that night of Irma Creed, one of his neighbors. Irma bothered Tommy in ways he couldn't explain. She made him nervous, and he'd been caught more than once staring at the front of her shirt. In his dreams, Irma followed Tommy into the wood
s. She wore nothing but her jeans. Her breasts swung slowly from side to side, and she licked her lips. The further into the woods and shadows she followed him, the less she looked like herself. Her hair grew taller and began to move, slowly at first, and then as a writhing mass of scaled bodies.

  Even in the dream Tommy remembered the story. He fought to keep from looking into her eyes, but she came closer and closer. Tommy woke with a shout, sitting upright in his bed and bathed in sweat. His erection was so solid it was painful, and for a panicked moment he thought he'd turned to stone—just that one part of him, the part that made him think about Irma and snakes.

  This was different. The snakes were everywhere, and though there were a hundred eyes in the old church, none of them focused on Tommy. Still, with the squirming, screaming girl held tightly in his hand, his fingers laced into her hair so deeply his nails brushed her scalp, and his knuckles white from the strain, he was hard as stone.

  Silas stood behind the pulpit at the far end of the church. It seemed a mile or more down that carpeted walk, and Silas loomed like a giant oak. He filled the end of the room with his presence. He whispered Tommy's name and beckoned him forward, and Tommy moved. He started down that carpeted walk, drawing the girl along with him despite her struggles.

  The snakes fascinated Tommy. He hated snakes, feared them more than almost anything he'd encountered on the mountain, but he did not hesitate when Silas called to him. They writhed and lunged, but didn't strike. Their eyes glittered brightly in the sunlight flashing in through the windows, and their tongues flickered like tiny fires, but Tommy remained unharmed. He pulled the girl closer against his side in case she proved more tempting.

  His mind wandered. He didn't want to think about the snakes. He didn't want to think about the strange chant that filled the church because it was so much like that other chant in the woods. The mark on his forehead throbbed, but it wasn't exactly pain. The pulse matched the rhythm of the combined voices and the twining of the snakes. It matched his heartbeat, and he fell into step with it, moving very slowly through the others. Or maybe he wasn't moving slowly. His mind was foggy, and it was hard to keep track. He drifted back an hour and his smile returned.

  Tommy moved silently through the trees. He kept his eyes on the trail ahead and to his left. The girl hadn't heard him yet, but he wasn't fooling himself. She'd grown up on the mountain just as he had, and if he made the slightest misstep, she'd hear it. The scene played out as it had in his dream, except in the dream she'd sped away, gaining a little bit of ground every few seconds until she disappeared from sight. Today he kept pace with her and closed the distance easily.

  When Tommy had awakened that morning, a single message had burned itself into his mind and his groin. Today was the day. Today was the day that promises would be kept, both ways. Today was the day he would go and fetch the girl, and when the service was complete, she would be his. That was how things worked now. Silas called, promised, and sent you off to earn your reward, and you went. No sense arguing with it—if he'd had any objection the agonized flesh of his forehead would have straightened him out.

  Angel was nowhere to be seen, and his father hadn't been home in days. There was a car parked in the driveway that Tommy had never seen before. None of it made any sense, but it didn't matter. He'd dressed, eaten, and left before sunrise, slipping off through the trees toward Jacob Carlson's vineyard on the far side of the mountain. He didn't know exactly where he'd find Elspeth Carlson, but he knew where to start looking, and somehow he knew he wasn't alone in this. She was there, waiting for him. It had been promised.

  The hike across the trails was uneventful and silent. He didn't notice at first, but after a while Tommy noted that even the birds and the animals had grown quiet. He didn't see any squirrels or birds moving overhead, and nothing crashed into the brush as he passed. He might have walked onto a movie set where the grounds had been carefully cleared ahead of time to prevent distraction.

  He found Elspeth walking along the upper edge of the grapevines. She had a small basket in her hand, and she was barefoot, just as he'd seen her. The girl was sixteen, and would be seventeen soon. Her hair was so long in back that it covered her shoulders and dipped to a rounded edge just at her waist. She had it tied back with a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes and to prevent it from snagging in the trees and vines.

  She was a slender girl, willowy, like a sapling. To Tommy she looked like a delicate doll. Her jeans were faded, just tight enough to prove from the rear that she wasn't a boy. Her bare feet were tan, her arms a dark chestnut brown. Tommy had watched her move a thousand times and never tired of it. He followed quietly, willed his breath to silence and scanned the ground ahead for branches and leaves. He didn't know how fast she might be, and he wanted to get as close as possible before she knew he was there.

  When he finally stepped out onto the trail, he was only about five yards behind her. He called out to her and she jumped, turning quickly, but she didn't run. He walked slowly down the path as if he belonged there, a wide smile on his face, and she stared at him. He saw from her stance that she was ready to sprint. He called out to her again, keeping his voice low and friendly.

  "Hey," he said. "You're out early."

  She stared at him without speaking. They had met before, and Tommy was pretty sure that she knew who he was, but they'd never spoken.

  By the time she noticed the intensity of his stare he was too close. Elspeth turned and sprang for the trees, but Tommy was ready for her. He cut her off, snagged her by the ponytail and yanked her back. She drew in a breath to scream, but he slapped his hand hard across her mouth and killed the sound. She tried to bite him and he pulled his hand back just long enough to draw back and smack her hard enough on the side of the head to make her eyes water. He clamped his hand back over her mouth and dragged her off the trail and into the trees.

  Tommy leaned in very close to her ear and spoke, keeping his voice low and controlled. His heart pounded, and he knew she felt him hard and swollen against her thigh where he pressed her tight between himself and the trunk of a pine tree.

  "If you scream, I'm going to knock you cold and carry you off like a sack of potatoes," he said. He waited a moment for this to sink in. "Do you understand?"

  Elspeth nodded. He kept his grip on her hair tight, and he pressed the weight of his body against her, pinning her in place. He released her mouth and she gasped in air. "Bastard," she hissed. "My pa will kill you."

  "Shut up," he growled. He yanked back on her hair and she cried out in pain and surprise. Tears dampened her cheeks, but she didn't break down. She glared at him, and Tommy reached into his back pocket. He pulled out a hip flask and gripped the lid with his teeth. He spun it deftly open and leaned in close again.

  "I'm going to tell you one time to drink this," he said. "If you spill it, try to spit it out, or scream, I'll do like I said and knock you cold."

  "What is it?" she asked.

  Tommy shook his head and brought the flask to her lips. Before she could protest further he pulled back on her hair. Her head tilted and he poured. When she started to choke, he pulled the flask away and pressed the back of his knuckles under her chin. At first she fought him, but he applied more pressure, and seconds later he saw the muscles of her throat work in a swallow. He tilted the flask again, and she drank without struggle. Tommy caught the scent of the liquor and if possible his erection hardened further. When the flask was emptied, he twisted the bottle onto the cap he still held between his teeth, and dropped it quickly back into his pocket.

  Elspeth had gone all but limp in his grip. She leaned into him, eyes dazed. He held her like that for a moment, stared into her eyes, and trembled. His mind filled with visions of her body, of the taste of that drink, shared between them, of driving his hips into hers and planting her in the soft soil. Of joining.

  He drew back with a gasp and turned. Without a word he started back, staying off the trail but moving parallel to it, heading for the church. His hair d
ripped perspiration, and though he was as careful as he could be not to yank the girl's hair out by its roots, the tendons in his arm were taut as strung piano wire.

  Tommy blinked. The church came back into focus, and he saw that they had progressed only a few feet. He shook his head and kept his gaze straight ahead. Behind Silas the curtains hung across the door to the baptistery, and Tommy shivered. Elspeth's struggles had grown weaker. She held him with both hands, trying to keep herself upright and the pressure off her hair. He ignored her and continued forward. As he passed the pulpit, Silas smiled.

  Then Tommy stepped through the curtains, and the ranks behind him closed, shoulders brushing, and serpents sliding from one body to the next and back.

  Silas turned and followed Tommy out of sight. As he went, he whispered, and the sound sifted through the congregation and echoed from the rafters.

  "Let her be cleansed."

  TWENTY

  When Harry George stepped off the trail that led up toward Jacob Carlson's farm, he heard loud voices, and he stopped. It was still early. He'd already visited Rachel Sherman and Cyrus Bates. There weren't many names left on the list he'd been running through his mind since speaking with Abraham. There were far fewer than he would have liked.

  Footsteps approached, and Harry stepped to the center of the trail. Whoever he heard was angry, and he didn't want to spark a wild shot from a rifle or cause a fright.

  "Who's there?" he called out. Best they know someone was on the trail before they saw him. Things had been strange on the mountain over the past few years, and it was always a good idea to be sure of the level of welcome before you walked onto a man's land.

  The voices grew silent, then the footsteps continued, moving more quickly. A moment later, Jacob Carlson rounded the corner ahead, followed by his boy Amos. Harry started to raise a hand in greeting, and then stopped. Jacob's face was contorted with a mixture of anger and worry that chilled the marrow in Harry's bones.