ANCIENT EYES.

By David Niall Wilson.

ONE.

They streamed out from the trees, in groups, singly, in pairs, turned onto the trail and moved deeper into the woods. They were silent, though their combined motion created a single voice. Whispered hints of words trailed after them in the sc.r.a.pe of booted feet and the rustle of cotton and linen skirts. Moonlight filtered through the trees and dappled the shadows with dancing lights.

Each had left behind the warmth of hearth and home without a backward glance. On their doors, already fading, his mark trailed down and joined with the grain of the wood. The mist of early morning would absorb it, and the bright light of the sun would melt it away. It was enough that they had seen it, that they had run their fingers down the coiling length of it, not quite brushing the design.

Some had journals, or Bibles, left to them by their fathers, mothers, grandfathers or uncles tucked away in the recesses of their bedrooms, or wrapped carefully and buried with their other memories in dusty attics and musty barns. Sometimes his symbol could be found scrawled in those pages, and at other times it was painstakingly etched and so minutely detailed that even a magnifying gla.s.s seemed inadequate to bring out the exquisite darkness of the image. The journals were seldom read, and if a page that bore his symbol was encountered, the book was closed. Nothing was said. Ever.

None of them carried a light into the woods. There was fire ahead, deep in among the trees, and they shuffled in a dazed procession toward that distant light. Though not a word was spoken, there was a voice on the wind. Deep, sonorous tones echoed from branch to branch and vibrated through the hills. He had marked them, and now he called. As their father's fathers had done, they answered, filing dead-limbed into the ripening night.

Sarah watched from her porch, her shawl drawn tightly around thin shoulders. She was old, but her eyes pierced the gloom like those of a predatory night bird. When shadows shifted, she unbound them and gave them the form of her neighbors marching into the woods, and despite the shawl, she shivered. Behind her, etched into the wood of her door, the ancient ward stood out in stark relief, carefully carved so many years before. Chanted over and tempered by fire, charred and pitted by...

She turned away, but not before the fire, deep in the woods, flared briefly. Through the trees, filtering into bare patches and etching itself along lines that should not be there, the red-orange brilliance outlined great, glaring eyes. Their gaze burned into her back as she opened her door and slipped inside, closing it slowly and firmly behind her. The eyes wavered, lingering as long as the image strobed her shocked night vision, then faded into rustling leaves and branches waving cold empty fingers at the moon.

Sarah strode purposefully to the mantel over her fireplace and opened the hinged wooden lid of the box that rested there. Inside was a small leather pouch, and she drew it out carefully. She didn't open it at first. Instead she ran her fingers over the leather. It had survived the years so much better than her own skin, which was wrinkled and stretched tighter over her bones with each pa.s.sing year. The bag was soft and supple, and burned into its side was the same symbol etched into her door. The symbol was a cross, but that was like saying that the sky was blue and ignoring the variations in hue, the dance of the clouds, and the birds wheeling overhead.

Her heels pressed into the wooden floor, and she felt his voice. The Earth breathed, and he spoke through her throat. The wind caught the words and the hills shook the sound from the sky. Sarah pulled the bag and its symbol close to her heart, bowed her head, and prayed.

At first there was no effect. Then, slowly, she felt his influence flow down and away, receding like the tide. Before it could shift, wash up and over her and drag her into the line of those disappearing into the trees, she opened the pouch, poured a small handful of powder into her hand, and stepped to the mantel.

The wall she faced was north, and she took a pinch of the powder in her free hand. She tossed it into the air in the direction of that wall, whispering to herself as she worked. Gabriel. Michael. Azrael. Rafael. Uriel. Charon. She called upon each in turn and made a slow circuit of the room, consecrating each wall, and each doorway, neglecting neither window nor chimney. Each time she tossed the powder into the air, something eased in her heart. The oppressive weight that had settled onto her shoulders lifted.

When she reached Charon, archangel of death, she blew the last of the powder off her fingers and rubbed her palms together in cleansing. He was gone.

She did not step to her window to watch the last of them disappear into the forest, she went instead to her desk, lit a single candle, and sat down to write. She wasted no words, because there was no reason. In the morning, when the sun had banished all but the bleakest memory of the night's blasphemy, she would take it down the mountain to the mail drop. Beneath her few words, she scrawled his symbol so there could be no mistaking her message.

In that instant, her candle dimmed. She hurriedly surrounded it with the circle, and banished it with the equal-armed strength of her cross. The candle flickered brightly, and Sarah sealed her missive with a dollop of wax. When it had dried, she traced a small symbol into the still malleable surface to speed it on its way, and she laid the envelope on her desk.

Then, as the late hour crept up on her, and her waning strength failed, she rose shakily and made her way to her bed. The cottage had only two rooms, and the bed did double duty as a couch. She had few needs now that her son, had gone into the world. She had no daughters, and few close neighbors. She closed her eyes and was asleep within moments, consciously fighting a dream of glowing eyes and deep resonant chants.

On the edge of the forest, Irma Creed glanced over her shoulder as she crossed the tree line and entered the woods. For just a moment, she stopped and stared. Sarah Carlson's cottage shimmered in the moonlight, and it looked as if it were coated in silver. Then his voice cut through her reverie, and she tore her gaze away. In moments the woods had swallowed her whole.

They ringed the fire, starting with a single man, slender and old with slate gray hair and bright eyes that caught the firelight and flung it to the sky. From his side they extended in a single, unbroken line, spiraling out from the center. They filled the clearing and threaded themselves through the trees when all of the open s.p.a.ce had been filled.

The one who had called them was nowhere to be seen, yet they swayed to the power of his voice. It crackled in the snap of branches, consumed in flames, and hissed as a brood of vipers rushing through the scant leaves of the trees over their heads. They did not touch one another. They did not speak. The air had grown heavy, not with the moisture of a rainstorm, but with a cloying, musky odor that permeated their clothing, slicked their skin and hair with sweat, and drew them into a single, undulating whole.

Their voices joined, first the old man nearest the fire, and then each of the others in succession, strengthening the unified wave of sound until it was dragged from its place on the breeze and ripped from the earth beneath their feet. The human spiral began to move.

Unlike their voices, this motion rolled from the outside in. The furthest from the flame stepped toward the next in line and they rippled, a human domino chain of energy that picked up speed slowly. The precision of it was uncanny; legs flashed beside legs, steps increased in speed, long strides and short, blended in a macabre dance. Seen from above they formed a serpent, uncoiling slowly and flexing its strength.

As the surge broke through the center rings, faster and faster, the coils tightened. At the end of it all, the old man with the gray hair and flashing eyes spun with the grace of a dancer. He flung his arms out and up. He closed his eyes and drew his legs together, poised. Though there was no wind, his hair lifted up and back from the flames. The chant, so subtle moments before, rose to a roar, rushed at him from behind and drew from the fire at the same time, a vortex of sound. He lifted until only the tips of his toes held his precarious balance on the surface of the clearing. Then the wave hit.

The others in the line didn't touch him, but he was lifted. He soared about six feet straight into the air and arched into the bonfire. Hot tongues of flame licked at him, even in flight, and his gray hair burst into a fiery halo that left a trail of sparks as he plummeted into the searing heat and the dancing, snapping flames. A collective sigh rolled back along the line and became a loud, hissing moan.

There were no screams of pain. There was no scent of burning flesh, nor any sign that the man had ever existed. The fire began, very slowly, to pull back in on itself. It was not possible to see it in the darkness, eyes blinded by sweat and brilliant flame, but as it died down its death followed a spiral pattern, mirroring that of the line of men, women, and children who swayed before it, catching speed as they had caught speed. It drew into the Earth at a single point, whipped faster and faster, round and round itself with such dazzling speed that it only appeared to flicker and gutter, caught in the same non-extant wind that had lifted the old man's hair from his head and his feet from the ground. It slid down to oblivion like a serpent entering its lair, and when it was done, he was there.

Tall shadows fell across their faces, but their blind eyes saw nothing. With the fire so suddenly gone, the moon re-a.s.serted her control of the night. The light was too dim, too soft and silver, and the shadows snaked about them like writhing snakes. They stood very still, and as their eyes adjusted, the shadows took a new form.

Long, slender branches with pointed tips shot out at crazed angles from the two points where they joined his scalp. The antlers were ponderous, heavier than the largest ten-point buck could carry, thick and k.n.o.bbed, ropy and twisted. He turned, very slowly, and that shadow wound its way in and around them until it fell across their pale, upturned faces. His eyes glittered like cut gems, glowing a brilliant flame yellow, even in the moonlight. He stood only about five foot eleven, but in that moment he loomed huge and imposing, the twisted shadow of antlers crisscrossing the air above his head like a crown of thorns.

They moved with him. Even as the sight that met their eyes registered on those gathered, they swayed, undulating in time, coiling and uncoiling. He was the horned serpent head and they his captured, scaled body, held in thrall by the force of his gaze and the hypnotic swaying motion of his shadow-crowned form.

He bent down to the ground at his feet, where the fire had crackled and danced so recently, and the motion swept the great shadow-antlers back through them without warning. Where the darkness met flesh, energy crackled, but there were no cries. Those who were touched would bear the scars to their graves, but in that instant they were parts of a single whole, and what they felt spread along the length of the chain and back to its head without a whimper.

He held one hand out before him. His forefinger was coated in dark, powdered ash. Without hesitation he stepped to the first in line behind him and drew that finger across the skin of a forehead. The symbol was smudged, but clear, obscure and intensely precise. The smudged, primitive image of the black body of a serpent wound its way up the forehead of a young girl, and her eyes went wide.

She toppled backward and crashed into the man behind her; he screamed suddenly and fell into an old woman with sand-gray hair and a hawk's nose. She had no time to join her voice to theirs before she fell against the man behind her, but moments later she found both voice and heart for it. What had been a coordinated unit joined in motion and grace dissolved to a chaos of sound, screaming voices and high pitched keening. Where bodies had moved in harmony, close as blades of gra.s.s but never touching, a confusion of limbs and motion erupted.

Up until that moment, things had progressed in slow fluidity, one motion leading the next. It had been ch.o.r.eographed to the sound of his voice and the flickering dance of the fire. Now it crumbled. Men ran in all directions, screamed, crashed into trees and trampled those before and behind them, the strong escaping and the weaker falling, or limping, some even crawling to escape that clearing and to get out from beneath the shadow of those huge, ebon antlers. Without the light of the fire to guide them, they ran blindly. Some found the path by luck; others ran deeper into the woods and hills. Children cried out for their parents and were ignored. From where the old man stood, his finger still poised in the air where it had left its mark on the smooth flesh of the girl's forehead, the clearing looked like a panoramic diorama of h.e.l.l, complete with tortured souls and a stereo soundtrack. He watched them stumble and crawl over one another until the last of them, even the tiniest child, had disappeared from sight, and then he watched a bit longer.

He had entered the woods as Silas Greene, but now? He didn't know if the name had meaning any longer. He felt the weight press down on him from above, but his hand pa.s.sed easily over his head. Nothing. He knew what was there-they all felt it-but on this plane, in this form, everything shifted.

Then he turned his hand and stared at the black ashes smudged on the tip of his finger.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," he said.

Then he began to chuckle. It was a deep-throated sound, louder and richer than could be expected to emanate from a human throat, particularly that of an old man. The ground shook, and he knew the sound would carry to them, and that they would redouble their efforts to escape. He wondered briefly how many would be lost in the woods come morning, and how many others would be brave enough to enter and search them out. He wondered if they would come back to the ashes of the fire, or spend their day trying to cleanse his mark from their brows.

They wore it. Everyone who had been touched in that tangle of bodies had been marked as surely as the one he'd touched directly. Others would see the mark in the light, and they would know. They would turn their faces from one another in shame and anger, but they would know. Those who had not been in the woods would know, as well, if they had not already guessed.

He threw back his head and the chuckle became a full-blown laugh. The sound echoed across the hills like thunder. Then, with purposeful strides, the man formerly known as Silas Greene turned and strode through the forest toward hearth and home. There was a great deal to accomplish, and little time.

In her cottage at the edge of the trees, Sarah shivered in her sleep.

TWO.

Silas Greene stared up at the old church in satisfaction. The walls were coated in a sort of green slime of mildew and moss. The forest encroached at its foundations; roots bit deep into masonry and brick and vines ate at wood siding and paint, but the building was sound. They would have to paint, replace the glazing on the windows that remained and repair the gla.s.s on the rest. The door was warped and swung off of one hinge, but it could be repaired and hung properly. The roof needed work, and the interior of the building had an abandoned, rank scent-half animal musk and the other half rotted vegetation. The pews stood as they had always stood, though now they were covered in dust. A couple of them showed the mark of termites. These would have to be removed carefully. Silas wasn't worried about the vermin. Men, insects, and rodents were equally simple to contain and control, once you knew their secrets. He stepped up to the door, pushed it wide, and entered. He was greeted by the flapping of startled wings. Something dislodged from the ceiling and fell in a trickle of dust to land behind the pulpit. Silas swept his gaze up and down the walls and took in the signature the years had etched across them. The church had never been magnificent. It came closer, in fact, to magnificence in its decay than it had ever aspired to in its glory. Once brilliant fluorescent lamps had illuminated the altar, while the muted golden light of wall sconces stretched back past the pews. Rich curtains of deep purple had run floor to ceiling behind the pulpit, covering the baptismal pool and the rest from sight until it was needed, and providing the perfect backdrop to the spot lit stage of the Lord.

He turned slowly and looked up above the frame of the door through which he'd entered. There was a small alcove just over the center, and in that he could just make out two eyes, glaring at him from the shadow. Hair roped out in strands from the sides of a narrow, elongated face. Leaves were woven in and out of those strands, carved of the wood of some ancient tree in a place and time so far removed from the mountain, and that church, that their history was lost.

The carved head should have stood out, stark and wrong against the flat, even boards of the church, but it did not. Instead, the roping, vine hair stretched to the sides and into the shadows. The glare of the eyes was intense, and if you returned that stare, even for a moment, you got the impression that, rather than the head being added to the church, the church had grown out from the wood of the strands, that it all centered back on that one small square shelf and the rest of it was nothing but the trappings of her court.

Silas tore his gaze away, and smiled. As he moved, just for an instant, the dark shadow of antlers pa.s.sed across the wooden floor and up the back of the rear pew. He caught the motion from the corner of his eye and his smile widened perceptibly.

Turning from the woman above the door, Silas felt as if she embraced him, as if the church itself embraced him, extending out in waves from her twining, ropy root hair. The walls wound around to the tattered remnant of the curtains, and beyond them he saw the concrete and tile of the pool. Plants grew there, green plants with roots and brown limbs, not the solid wood of the woman's hair, but the earth, probing inward and trying to reclaim what had been stolen. The stone and the wood, the tile and the water-was there still water? Was it possible? Was it blessed, and if so, by whom?

Silas strode down the center aisle, ignoring the piles of moldy hymnals and the scattered papers, crushing the folding paper fans with stained-gla.s.s images and fair-haired Anglo-Saxon Christs, blue-eyed and smiling beneficently as they walked on water and healed the lame. As the children gathered at their feet. As demons fled into the swine.

Something sloshed in the water, slid over the side of the pool, and was gone in a sinuous roll across the wooden floor and out the rear door of the building. Silas ignored it. As he neared the altar the dark energy that had filled him so completely since the bonfire in the woods awoke. His senses expanded. He was aware of the scent of the water in the rotted pool, felt the pulse of the creatures that rested within, and around him. He felt that other; her eyes bored through the back of his skull and pressed him onward. He felt more acutely the embrace of the arms that extended from beneath that carved head through the medium of walls and windows, floor and patched roof. The building was alive, and the deeper he entered into that life, the more a part of it he became, and the less a part of all he had left behind.

Silas Greene had a life. At least, the man who had been Silas Greene had one. There was a small store at the fork of the mountain paths leading down the far side. One path wound up to Friendly, California and the other down toward San Valencez and the ocean beyond. Above the door of that store hung a sign proclaiming it to be "Greene's General Store." Folks went there for things they were too lazy, or in too much of a hurry to fetch from 'outside.' You could buy foodstuff, books, paper and pens, canning supplies. Silas kept "a little of everything and a lot of nothing," as he was fond of proclaiming.

No one had seen that door open since Silas had filed into the wood, along with the rest of them almost a week before. No one had seen a light in his house, or smoke rising from his chimney. In point of fact, no one had seen Silas Greene at all since that night-not since he'd lowered his head and swept those great black shadow antlers through them, scattering them like leaves in the wind. Most folks had a vague notion that it had been Silas, but they couldn't quite credit it in their daytime minds. They knew Silas.

They knew nothing. Silas knew them, though, and he had an idea that this would make all the difference. He found, in fact, as he stepped closer to the stagnant pool that had once washed away the sins of the "true believers" and girded them in the white-light armor of their Lord, that he knew more of them than he had before. He knew their names, their faces, their lives and loves. He knew each one he had touched, and by peripheral contact all of those who had, in turn, been touched.

He felt them, heard their thoughts as if whispered just out of reach. He had made his mark on that girl, and she had spread it like a virus, infecting their minds with the touch of his mind. They clung to the marks he had given them selfishly, hid them in shame by the light of day and caressed them alone in the darkness.

They had dreams. All men have dreams. Those dreams were awakened by his presence and promised in the great sweep of darkness that hovered above and just beyond him. Silas could bring them their dreams. Silas would bring them their dreams. All they had to do was to follow him. All they had to do was throw themselves at his feet and grovel. All they had to do was to turn off the light of their personal choice and set that choice on the altar, and he would take them in.

But Silas wasn't ready. It wasn't yet time. There was a great deal of work to be done, and he was going to need a few of them to a.s.sist him in beginning that work. The temptation was strong to call them all to him at once and attack the old church in a frenzied flurry of rebirth and power, but that temptation was born of Silas Greene, and not of the thing that had inhabited his mind and soul. He still walked and talked with Greene's voice, but he was more-and less-than he had once been, and while Silas himself was greedy and without patience, the other was not.

Nor was she who watched him, bound as she was to the roots and stone of the mountain, part and parcel to the church building and all it had stood for-and would again. She had waited and watched over the barren pews and the broken windows. She had sung her quiet songs to the creatures that slithered through the depths of the baptismal pool and watched the sunsets drip red down the walls through a lens of stained gla.s.s. She had seen the horned one arise, and fall, the only power to rival and mesh with her own within her range. Now he had risen again, and she would watch and blend with him-strengthen him-and then? Well, first things first.

Silas stood with his hands planted on the edge of the old baptismal pool and gazed into its depths. They were as he remembered-as the man Silas Greene remembered. Sinuous bodies rolled over and around one another and formed arcane patterns. Their triangular heads and flitting tongues darted this way and that, swayed in the air, and all of those glittering, emotionless eyes watched him in return.

It was mesmerizing. There was a crack in the side of the tank, a break in the perfect symmetry of the tiled interior. They could have escaped at any time-no doubt had escaped, time and again, but they had returned. A quick glance around the alcove showed that the gla.s.s tanks had been shattered. Their shards and glittering bits lay in moss-encrusted clumps strewn about the floor. But the baptismal pool had drained, and they had found their way inside.

They had waited. Perhaps she had called and held them-Silas didn't know, but he remembered. He'd seen these snakes, or their ancestors, before. The images hung like tapestries in the back of his mind, blocking off parts of himself that might have blossomed into something more than a small time shopkeeper on a remote mountain-parts of him that might have found a woman, fallen in love, or even made friends. All of that was lost to him, but the memory was not.

"Hallelujah!" He whispered to himself. The word slid in among the snakes and drew him into his past.

The Greene's wound their way slowly through the trees toward the church, one family among many. They greeted those they pa.s.sed, but did not linger to gossip. Sundays were not their time, but the Lord's, and Reverend Kotz was waiting for them. No one wanted to be the first through the doors of the church, but worse still was to arrive late.

Silas clung to his mother's coat and hurried his steps to keep up with the adults. His cheeks burned whenever they pa.s.sed one of his schoolmates, because he didn't want them to see him clinging to his parents in this way, but the truth was that Silas was frightened of the church. There was something about the way its white painted walls gleamed in the morning sunlight that was false, like one of the older women with makeup caked all over her face to hide which side of fifty she was. Reverend Kotz was worse.

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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.semblage 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 G.o.d 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 c.o.c.kfight, 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 l.u.s.t 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 c.o.c.ks 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 pa.s.s-and fall. Eyes glared at him from all sides, voices cried out, and in the background he heard the shrill screeching of the c.o.c.ks.

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 c.o.c.k'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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 rea.s.sert themselves in a universe that had just given them a wakeup call from h.e.l.l. 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 c.o.c.k'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 pa.s.s.

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, pa.s.sed 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 c.o.c.ked 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.