Four more sticks materialized close to that first bundle. They crept out of the darkness at the tunnel’s mouth and latched around its upper curvature. Micah stood frozen. The fingers were long and wiry like insulated electrical cables. Well, isn’t that odd? Dreamily, Micah wondered what they could be attached to. He tried to picture the wrists and arms, the body… Next, his brain went dark, his synapses dimming like a cityscape during a rolling blackout.
Then came the sounds. They traveled up from the tunnel below them. The laughter of children. A charmless sound, full of mocking malice.
“Come.”
A child’s voice. But not exactly. More the voice of a child who had lived in this sunless place for a minor eternity. A child whose eyes were yellow as a cat’s eyes and whose flesh has the look of old parchment. A wizened and corrupted thing whose throaty chuckling drifted up from the bowels of the earth.
“Meat for the feast,” the voice called.
The strain of terror that entered Micah’s heart at that moment was unlike any he’d ever felt—even worse than anything he’d experienced in Korea, though he had been scared an awful lot over there. But those were understandable fears. Fears about what war—and the machinations of his fellow man—could do to your body and mind. He was ripped back through time to a cold night in Korea when he’d been walking past the medic’s tent; the flap blew open in a high wind. He saw a young soldier—still a boy, really—lying on a makeshift bed. His arms and legs had been blown off. All that was left were these rags of flesh that swung and drooped from the stumps of his legs like thick moldering curtains. The boy wasn’t screaming. The shock put him beyond all that. Micah had glimpsed the surgeon’s eyes above his blood-spattered mask: they reflected a dull emptiness, as if he wasn’t seeing the patient in front of him. A single word drifted out of that open flap before the wind blew it shut again: Mommy. One of those men had called out for his mother—and Micah was almost positive that it hadn’t been the soldier’s voice.
The terror of war was a bodily one—the fear that you might die in the shit and muck or, worse, get blown apart and live and have to continue on in a horribly reduced capacity. But at least it was a known horror, and your enemy was clear. He shared your same skin.
But right now? Those fingers curled round the rock and the sound of that laughter… it was a rip in the everyday fabric. A glimpse in the roiling heart of something impossible to comprehend. Even those things in the woods were dangerous only to a point: they would rip you to shreds and make an end of you. Tear your guts out like they had done to poor Charlie and Otis, who were beyond suffering now.
“Shug?” Minerva said from someplace over the mountain and far away.
Micah’s eyes remained on those fingers. They tensed as if in preparation to propel the rest of its body forward the way a spider pushes itself from its hidey-hole: the legs coming first, spanning all around the hole, then the fat black nut of its body surging forth—
The laughter dried up… Then it returned even louder than before.
Minerva gripped his wrist. “Please.”
8
BE PENITENT. Be remorseful. Be the father they need.
Reverend Amos Flesher sat cross-legged on the chapel floor. A chapel built to his exact specifications and erected by his flock. For months, he had sermonized from its pulpit. His people had received his words with the lamblike docility he had entrenched in them and thus come to expect.
But now, their trust in him had been shaken. At first he had been angered by their treachery—his rage had been such that he’d pictured bashing their heads in until their skulls resembled broken, bloodied crockery… but then the Voice spoke, and he listened. Now he understood that the best way back into his people’s hearts was through atonement. He had to grovel on his belly.
Be humbled, Amos. Humbled before God and humbled by these ungodly circumstances. They will welcome you back into their hearts.
He stood and walked between the pews. He inhaled the lemony scent of the wood wax—he had insisted upon the brand, as he had insisted on the tiniest detail at Little Heaven. He stood before the chapel window. Night hung over the compound. His face was reflected in the glass. His cheeks were furred with a three-day beard, his eyes set deep in his sockets. No matter. He would feel so much better soon. He had been promised, hadn’t he? All he had to do was fulfill his end of the bargain. And Amos would have help in this, he knew. It was in the water now, in the food they ate and the air they all breathed. They were helpless against the forces marshaling against them. They were mindless insects. But then, in Amos’s eyes, they always had been. They would come back to him, slaves to the sonar in their meek little brains that carried them to Amos like ants back to a poisoned hill.
He fixed his hair, setting it just so. He set his shoulders and straightened his spine, drawing himself up to his full height. A showman must always hold a sense of the moment.
He walked between the pews to the front doors. His hands gripped the brass knobs—L imprinted on the left, H on the right.
“Showtime.”
He threw the doors open. Then he signaled Virgil to ring the bell. It tolled steadily, rolling over the compound and into the inhospitable woods. He spread his arms.
“Come, my children,” he whispered. “Come back to me.”
He watched them stumble into the square. Single worshippers at first, but they were soon joined by entire families. They were fearful and bruised of spirit. Amos would salve them. It was his gift. His voice was their balm. His people stood before his chapel like frightened animals. Its beckoning light spilled over Amos’s shoulders. He saw that light reflected in the eyes of his flock.
“I stand penitent before you. I want to say that I am sorry,” he said. “Truly I am.”
NATE WAS WITH ELLEN when the chapel bell began to toll. Each ring shivered the bunkhouse walls. Nate went to the window. The Reverend was standing at the chapel door with his arms outspread.
Ellen opened the bunkhouse door. She and Nate stepped onto the grass. The things in the woods hadn’t been heard from all day. But it was night now, and that was always when monsters came out.
People began to filter into the square. They look so lost, Nate thought. A lot of them wore timid, hopeful smiles. They walked with their heads tilted forward and their fingers pointing back. They looked cartoonish, like Porky Pig drifting toward a pie cooling on a windowsilclass="underline" they all had that same dozy, dopey expression.
His father passed by. “You coming, Nate?”
Nate gave him a flat stare. “Maybe later.”
His dad shoved his hands in his pockets. He tried to smile, but his face wouldn’t cooperate. “Things will get better, buddy. You just watch. The Reverend will—”
Nate grabbed Ellen’s hand. His father saw it. He dropped his head and nodded once, a tiny bob of his head, then followed the others.
“You don’t want to go with him?” Ellen asked once he was gone.
Nate shook his head. “I don’t trust him.”
“The Reverend or your father?”
Neither of them, Nate thought.
“COME IN, COME,” Amos said. “Enter the house of the holy.”
Nell Conkwright—the leprous cunt, the scheming bitch the sea hag the whore—stopped at the chapel threshold. She licked her lips, as if physically hungry for everything that lay within. But she couldn’t quite force herself through. She eyeballed Amos coldly.