Part 1 (1/2)

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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fted, she unbound them and gave them the form of her neighbors marching into the woods, and despite the shawl, she s.h.i.+vered. 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 s.h.i.+ft, 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 s.h.i.+mmered 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fted.

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 s.h.i.+vered 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, crus.h.i.+ng 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.