* * *
—
the uniformed men tromped in the next morning, talking loud. Their ungainly bodies filled up the front room, surrounded her. Once again she was the center of attention.
She recognized only Tom Acherson, the one-armed man who worked for the park. He seemed embarrassed to be there. “You don’t have to worry,” he said. “We know this isn’t your fault. We just need you to tell us what happened that night.”
She looked into their faces. They were treating her like a frightened little girl. Like a human being. Motty stood nearby, watching.
“Lincoln came over around six,” Stella said. “Maybe it was six-thirty.”
Nothing she told them was a surprise. Everything jibed with the story Abby had told them when he turned himself in. He’d given Stella and Lincoln the liquor he’d brewed himself. At the end of the night he sent them down the mountain.
“What’s going to happen?” Stella said.
“Nothing to you, honey,” one of the policemen said. “Nothing to you.”
They were buttoning their coats when the first church bell rang, and were still chatting when it rang again. On the third bell Tom quieted the other men, and Stella realized what was happening. The policemen held their hats in their hands, stared at their shoes.
Tom was looking at Stella, his eyes full of pity. Was she supposed to be feeling something? There was nothing in her but a granite heaviness.
The bell tolled again, and again, again. She didn’t like the side glances of the men and stood up from her chair. Went to her bedroom, counting. Twelve. Thirteen. She closed the door but it made no difference in the sound: each toll resonated down the valley through winter air and penetrated the cabin walls like they were paper. Each louder and clearer than the last. Each a pronouncement.
The seventeenth bell rang. The sound hung in the air, incomplete and unfinished, waiting to be drowned out by the next bell.
* * *
—
that night, Stella lay awake, listening, until finally the baby stopped crying and Motty fell asleep. She sat on the edge of her bed and unwrapped her hands. The wounds had scabbed over. She quietly put on her coat and laced her boots.
The crate sat on the floor at the foot of Motty’s bed, the baby nestled in the blankets. Stella picked up the child, holding it below rump and neck the way Motty did, and carried it out of the room. In the kitchen, Stella opened her coat and tucked the baby against her chest. It curled against her instinctually.
She buttoned the coat over it. There. It was almost as if she were pregnant.
She walked out into the cold, headed up between the trees. The baby stirred but didn’t awaken.
The chapel door was splintered, the lock burst apart, where the God had pushed its way out. The panel covering the stairs had been tossed aside. Stella cradled the child with one arm and stepped down.
After so many visits, Stella knew the way through the mountain, even in darkness. Soon she put out her free hand and there was the stone table, rising like a flattened mushroom out of the stone floor. She backed up to it, shielding the baby, and then levered herself atop it.
She’d stood atop this stone many times, arms out, waiting for the Ghostdaddy to come to her. She wasn’t going to wait this time. She cinched the belt of the coat tight, under the child’s butt. It lay snug against her, tight as skin.
Stella opened her hands. A sharp pain, like a serrated knife dragging across her palm, and the threads emerged. Her vision misted as it had on the road outside. The darkness turned red.
“Show me,” she said. The white tips of the threads brushed the face of the stone, then began to slip higher. There: a lip of stone that could support her weight. There, a bulge of rock to grab next.
She began to climb.
There were long seconds when she could see no way forward and her arms began to ache. And then the strands would find a crevice or a ridge and she’d pull herself up. The ceiling seemed to recede from her. Gaps appeared, as if the rock was slipping aside, widening just enough for her body. She thought, The mountain is opening its arms for us.
She climbed higher, and when she reached for a projection of rock she found instead a hole, a little wider than her shoulders. She drew her threads into her, and inched inside, one arm covering the baby.
The tunnel gradually widened, and soon she could crawl, moving awkwardly with one arm across her belly, holding the child in place. Twenty yards on she could stand. The passage turned, turned again, corkscrewing up into the mountain, until she emerged in faint golden light.
She stood in a vaulted cavern. The light glowed from recesses in the floor. There were twenty or thirty of these holes scattered across the space, like pools of honey. Stella walked to the closest. The cavity was lidded in amber. A dark shape nestled inside, curled like a question mark.
Stella crouched, holding the baby, and with her free hand touched the glassy surface. Despite the light it was as cool as the stone. She leaned closer.
A sound escaped her, and she jerked back.
It was a child. Or something that could have been a child, if it had lived. If it had been more human.
She looked around the cavern at the dozens of recesses. She walked to the next one, a few feet away. Her heart beat fast. Inside lay another tiny body, cradled in jellied light. This one’s head was very large, but its short limbs ended with fingers melded into blunt hooves.
She was sobbing now, so hard she was struggling to get breath. She dragged herself to the next hollow, and the next. One body after another. Some looked human. Some looked like no creature she’d ever seen. All were dead.
And all were her sisters—as much a sister as the newborn she held now. Generations of the God’s children, born from the bodies of pigs. All delivered back to the Ghostdaddy by their survivors, Lena and Motty and Esther—and Stella. She was part of this, too. Her hands were not clean.
She drew a breath, and shouted. “Show yourself!” Her echo mocked her.
Then, high up in the ceiling, something moved. A pale shape slowly unfolded from the rock. One flat, mantis limb eased down, seemed to test the floor. Then another. Its bulbous torso swayed as it descended, finally settled. Its body seemed to lock into place.
“You can’t do this anymore,” she said. Her voice was shaking. She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “You hear me?”
It remained mute. As always. If it could speak, it wouldn’t need a Revelator.
Stella unbuttoned her coat with one hand. Held the child with the other. The child stirred and made a sound like a mouse.
“This girl is the last one. No more, do you hear me? No more…experiments.”
The Ghostdaddy didn’t move, but she could feel its attention on her. She moved close to it. “You don’t get to use her,” Stella said. “There can’t be any more. It has to stop. And I’ll make sure there aren’t any more.”
The bulging belly looked perfectly smooth, but she knew that it was dusted with minuscule perforations, a thousand tiny mouths. It breathed through these, and smelled and ate and heard through them. Beneath that skin was where it lived, the same way Stella lived behind her eyes. This world was anathema to it. The air was poison; the soil, poison; the sun, too. It was losing the battle, but it could live for a hundred more years. She didn’t know how to kill it. And it could kill her with a gesture.
The Ghostdaddy eased forward, creaking.
“Stop,” she said.
Stella didn’t know how to kill it. But the Bible had taught her how to negotiate with gods. All you had to do was be willing to murder what you loved.
She opened her right hand. The threads floated out of her, and there was no pain this time. A few of them would be all it would take. The newborn was tiny. Fragile. Stella could strike before the God moved.
“I’m leaving the cove,” she told it. �
��If I ever find out you’ve touched this girl, I’ll kill her.”
It gave no sign it heard her. God never answered Abraham, either.
“If you ever make another child, I’ll kill it, too,” Stella said. “I’ll kill every last one.”
26
1948
The threads carried Stella into the heart of the mountain, as they’d done ten years before. Her right arm was slowly returning to her. She could lift it slightly, and wiggle her fingers, though every movement brought pain.
The threads did much of the work. They found purchase in the rock, hauled her up through the red darkness.
She was crawling through the most narrow passage when she felt the low rumble she’d first experienced when she was a child, like distant thunder. Then she stepped into the cavern and saw them.
Sunny was communing with her god.
The girl knelt on the stone floor, her head thrown back, surrounded by lozenges of yellow light. Her arms were outstretched, and hundreds of threads sprouted from each palm and connected to the pale giant like a shimmering cat’s cradle. The God and the girl swayed together, their arms sawing in tandem. Dancing.
Stella recognized ecstasy. She’d never seen it from the outside, but she remembered her body filling with jagged joy, as if the Ghostdaddy were climbing inside her. It was no mystery why Sunny schemed and lied to get back to the cave. The God loved her and she loved the God. What was Stella to it but another failed vessel, someone too weak to do its divine work?
Stella strode across the stone floor, between the glassy recesses where her sisters—all those failed attempts—were preserved. The Ghostdaddy had never asked for permission to make them, and there’d never been a Birch woman or man with the sand to question it.
Stella was just as guilty. More so. It wasn’t the Ghostdaddy that killed Lunk.
“Hey,” she said. The rumble filled up the air, muffled her voice. Louder she said, “Sunny. Hey.” The girl’s eyes were closed. Her mouth hung slack. Then she seemed to lose her balance, and the Ghostdaddy gently tugged her upright like a puppet.
Enough, Stella thought.
Stella ducked beneath the Ghostdaddy’s outstretched limb, placing herself between the creature and the girl. The twined threads stretched out on either side of Stella as if she stood on a rope bridge.
The Ghostdaddy’s bulging torso hung at eye level. It was from this belly that the low sound emanated, its only voice. Deep inside it were all the vitals that kept it alive.
It had to know that she meant the promise she’d made ten years ago, meant it with all her heart. And now, it could stop her from carrying it out, strike her down in an instant. All it had to do was release Sunny and spike one of its hard limbs into her.
“Do it,” she said aloud.
If the creature released Sunny, and the girl saw her god murder Stella, maybe Sunny would run. Maybe she’d realize how little the thing cared for its daughters.
“Come on!” Stella screamed. “You think I won’t do it?”
She turned and marched to Sunny. Gripped the girl by the throat with her left hand. “You think I won’t sacrifice one more to stop this?”
Stop me, Stella thought. Stop me.
Sunny’s mouth moved. Then sounds emerged. Babbling, not words at all. Then the babble became a hiss, and the hiss a word.
“Stella.”
Fuck.
She dropped her hand from the girl’s throat.
Sunny’s eyes remained closed. “Don’t,” Sunny said. “Not yet.”
Stella thought, You stupid girl. Stupid as every Revelator who’d come before her.
Sunny kept repeating, “Not yet. Not yet.” Her god gazed down. Its flower-like hands were wide open, each of Sunny’s tendrils buried in the soft flesh there.
Stella touched the threads coming from Sunny’s left hand. They were soft as oil. She could almost hear the creature’s thoughts humming through them. “I’m sorry,” she said. Then she closed her fist around the threads, and yanked. The threads popped free from the Ghostdaddy with a sickening, soft pop.
Sunny cried out and collapsed onto the vault floor. The needle-sharp tips in Stella’s grip flailed about, seeking reconnection. Several sliced through Stella’s shirtsleeve, raked her flesh. She shouted a curse and tossed them away from her. The filaments thrashed against the floor.
The Ghostdaddy reared back. The threads attached to its right limb were pulled taut and Sunny was dragged several feet across the stone.
Stella threw herself against that second bundle of strands, seized it with both hands, ignoring the pain in her arm. She jerked the threads from the creature’s body.
Sunny fell onto her side, her entire body shaking. The thrumming abruptly stopped. The silence seemed to ring like a chime.
One of the Ghostdaddy’s limbs was still outstretched, the petal fingers open. Stella threw open her own arms. “Well? Well?”
The limb swung down like a scythe and struck the floor at Stella’s feet. The creature listed to the side. Then, very slowly, its huge body eased to the ground.
Stella screamed at it. She opened her fist, and her threads burst free. She touched them to a spot on its pale torso. There, she thought. Right there. Maybe it was possible to kill the creature after all.
The Ghostdaddy didn’t pull away. Didn’t move to defend itself. And her threads…felt nothing.
No pulse of its blood. None of the whispering sounds of its breathing.
The God she’d worshipped since she was nine years old was dead.
* * *
—
stella carried Sunny up the stairs, the girl slack in her arms, unconscious. Stella’s strands wrapped her body like spider silk.
Please be all right, Stella thought. Please. She didn’t know if she’d stopped the communion in time. Sunny had taken more than a sip. No telling what it had done to her.
The sanctuary was empty except for the corpses. Hendrick. Brother Paul. The man she’d killed first, whose name she’d never learned. Morgan Birch and John Headley, however, had gotten out with the soundman. Good for them.
Abby was watching for them, just down the hill. He was burning like a torch in the violet air. Somehow he’d gotten back on his feet.
“Is she…?” His voice high-pitched, plaintive.
“It’s okay,” Stella said. “She’s just—” Stella sagged, and Abby caught her, her and Sunny. He took the girl from her.
Stella drew the strands back into herself. Her vision returned to normal. She was sorry to see the night grow so dark. God, she was tired.
Abby was alarmed at her bloody shirt. “What happened in there? I heard shots.”
“Don’t worry, the blood’s not mine. Most of it.”
She didn’t know what to tell him. I murdered three men. The Ghostdaddy died. Sunny survived. Three monumental things that she didn’t have the words to explain. Her only fear now was that the girl’s mind had been scoured clean before the communion had been severed.
“Where’s Rickie?” she asked.
“Woke up and left, with the rest of ’em.”
They walked the ridge toward Abby’s shack, moving slowly, Abby grunting every time a step jarred him, but he wouldn’t put down the girl. Stella was sorry for how much this was costing him.
Finally they reached the hairpin where the Roadmaster’s front whitewall was hung up on the log like a bear paw in a trap.
Abby said, “Who taught you to drive?”
“Funny story.”
Stella opened the rear door and Abby laid Sunny down across the back seat. She was breathing easy, as if she’d nestled into a beautiful dream. The threads had rolled up inside her, and her hands were as unmarred as ever. No holes to even show the disciples.
Stella touched her head. The girl stirred. Opened her eyes sleepily. “Stella,” sh
e said.
Tears sprang into Stella’s eyes. She spoke!
“It’s okay,” Stella said. “You can rest.”
Sunny rolled onto her side.
“She okay?” Abby asked.
“She’s fine,” Stella said. The relief was like a blast of oxygen. She rubbed the wet from her cheeks.
Abby said, “We’re going to need the jack.”
Stella unlocked the trunk. The spare usually sat upright in its well, but Pee Wee had removed it to make room for the hooch, seventy gallons’ worth. She hoped to hell he hadn’t thrown out the jack, too. With her good arm Stella began lifting out brown jugs, and lined them up along the road. Abby leaned against a tree, breathing hard.
She found the jack tucked into the well, wrapped in its own leather case. She assembled it under the front bumper, ratcheted the car up with her good hand. Stella was sweating hard despite the cold, and her wounded arm burned.
Stella gingerly got behind the wheel, leaving the door open. The key was still in the ignition. She started the engine, put it in reverse, holding down the clutch. “Stand back,” she said.
She gunned it. The car lurched and dropped onto the road, bouncing on heavy springs.
Sunny didn’t even stir.
Stella climbed out. Walked over to one of the jugs, held it between her feet while she unscrewed the cap with her good arm. Offered it to Abby. “Do me the honors?”
He hesitated. His lip was split, his face still a mess. “I guess one pull couldn’t hurt.” He drank deep. Shook his head like a wet dog. “Goodness sake, Stella Wallace!”
“You can’t complain, old man. That there’s Uncle Dan’s recipe.”
“It sure is.”
Stella took the jug from him and tipped it. Let the fire run down her throat. “I need you to take her to Merle and Pee Wee’s,” she said. “They’re expecting her.”
“You ain’t coming with?”
“I’ve got some things to take care of first.”
“Those Georgians, they’ll be coming back with police.”
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