“I’m afraid that’s not how it works, love.”
He sets the last few cans upright and steps away. This time, I hit the second can. I was aiming at the first one, but it’s a definite improvement.
A half hour or so later, he’s taught me how to reload and where the safety is, and my aim is improving rapidly. I’m routinely hitting six out of eight and finally manage a clean sweep. The trick, at least for me, seems to be holding my breath when I fire and, most importantly, thinking of this as a game. If I remember that it’s a real and potentially deadly weapon in my hand, my aim isn’t nearly as good.
“My turn,” Kiernan says as he steps forward, his mouth pressed in a thin line. He gets seven this time, and then it’s back to six again. And the next time, it’s still six.
I’m doing a really good job of keeping a straight face, until he looks over at me and raises his eyebrows, at which point the triumphant grin sneaks out of control. “I played a lot of this video game called Duck Hunt when I lived in Iowa. So maybe . . .” I shrug.
“Yeah, right. I’m going to put these back in the house,” he says, his lower lip out slightly in a mock pout. “You have a moral obligation to help repair my shattered male ego, now that you’ve totally emasculated me, so you might want to start thinking of how you’re going to manage that.”
I snort at his retreating, broad-shouldered, totally unemasculated back and wonder who slipped him a copy of Freud a decade or two in advance. I’m looking around for a bin or someplace to discard the mangled cans when Kiernan comes up and pulls some sort of hat onto my head.
“What the—”
“Safety precaution.” He’s wearing one, too—it looks kind of like a leather helmet, with long brown flaps that hang down over his ears.
“You look like Daphne,” I say.
“I’ve had worse insults. But you really should look in the mirror before talking.”
“And this is a safety precaution for . . . ?”
He leads me around the corner and into the shed. The rear bicycle wheel I noticed earlier is attached to a bike that looks pretty much like Mom’s, which I occasionally ride in DC, except there’s a weird cylindrical object attached beneath the crossbar and a few extra parts here and there. There’s another bike a few feet away, identical other than the wicker basket strapped to the back fender.
“These are actually football helmets,” he says. “There’s no such thing as a motorcycle helmet in 1905, but since I suspected you’d never get on one without a helmet . . .”
“Kiernan, those just look like bikes.”
“Well, they are bikes, for the most part. With a motor added, so you can go faster. I have a car waiting in 1938, but it seemed pointless to try and teach you how to drive here, because autos change a lot between now and then. So I bought these. They’ll be fine here in the shed for a couple of years, and—”
I sigh, closing my eyes. The house I kind of understand. But the bikes? Kiernan seems to be building up a fantasy where I stay here in 1905 with him and wander around the countryside, going on rides and having picnics or whatever.
“Kiernan, you need transportation in 1905. I don’t. The CHRONOS key takes care of that.”
He leans back against the wall and gives me a long look. “I was hoping we could do the fun part first, but you’re right. Let’s go back inside. You need to see the mess your grandpa left in 1911.”
∞13∞
I sit down at the small kitchen table and pull my helmet off. The inside is now a nearly uniform shade of gray. I run my finger across it, and sure enough, it comes away coated with the temporary hair color.
Kiernan climbs down from the loft, a yellow box under one arm. He hands it to me, and I run my fingertip over his wrist, leaving a silvery trail. “Oops,” he says, looking back up at me. “Sorry about that.”
“Ri-i-ght. I don’t believe you for even a second. How badly is it smeared?”
“Um . . . it’s bad. Looks like you’re wearing a gray helmet.”
I narrow my eyes and yank the box toward me before noticing Kiernan’s expression. He’s looking at it as though it houses something poisonous. I decide to treat it with a bit more caution and lift the lid gingerly.
No snakes or spiders. Aside from the CHRONOS diary at the bottom of the box, it’s nothing more than newspaper clippings, maybe a dozen in all, with headlines like “Grisly Scene in Backwoods Church,” and “Greene County Deaths Still a Mystery.” Most of them are just text, dated late September 1911, but two of the articles near the bottom have photographs.
I begin with those, but after I see the pictures, I wish I’d started with the text-only articles and worked up an immunity. The images are both black and white, and they aren’t especially gory. But they are eerie as hell.
“How many dead?” I ask.
“One account said forty-seven; another said forty-eight. There was at least one small kid, so maybe someone just counted the heads in the pews and didn’t look in laps. The village is isolated, but they’re pretty sure it was the entire population. A few of their people always came into town for supplies once a week, like clockwork. When they didn’t show up two weeks in a row, someone went looking.”
The pictures are both taken inside a tiny, rustic church with a simple pulpit, adorned only by a cross in the middle. To the right of the pulpit is a woman’s body, tall and thin, sitting upright on a bench, her head slumped against the top of the dark wood panel separating the pulpit area from the small choir loft directly behind it. A chest about the size of a coffee table, standing waist high on long, thin legs, sits off to the left, the lid open. Something inside the chest reflects light from the windows, but I can’t tell what it is.
My eyes instinctively avoid the foreground of the image, where bodies slump to the side or lean against each other in most of the pews. A child’s arm dangles over one side. The bodies seem intact, but the skin looks strange. And they’re emaciated, some appearing almost mummified.
“Notice anything odd?” Kiernan asks, crouching down beside me to look over my shoulder. “Other than the fact that they’ve all died inside the church. And that they all look like the life has been sucked out of them.”
“Well, they’re mostly women and girls. Two-thirds, at least. Sort of like at Estero.”
“That’s true,” he says. “Based on what I’ve seen, however, that’s true of most cults. I’ll pass on speculating as to why they might attract more women than men, since my best guess will likely earn me a kick in the shin.”
He gets the kick anyway, just for thinking it. “Funny, coming from the guy who was once a loyal Cyrist—”
“Because his mother dragged him along, in case you’ve forgotten. See anything else unusual? Or at least unusual for Georgia forty-some years after the Civil War?”
I look a bit more closely at the pictures. It’s hard to tell, because the photographs are grainy and low resolution. The bodies aren’t exactly in tip-top shape, either, but it looks like some of them are white, while others are African American.
“It’s a mixed-race congregation. That’s not common down here, is it?”
“No,” he says. “I thought it was unusual, too, and one good thing about being an eccentric Yankee visitor is that you can ask questions anyone else would know and locals aren’t surprised. You might not get a full or truthful answer, but I think I got enough to piece things together. The lady at the store where I buy the local paper, Mrs. Morton, said a lot of the churches did have mixed membership before the Civil War, because the plantations were spread out. Slaves were taught to worship as their masters did, and it was easier if everyone just attended services together. After the war, most religions split off into a colored group and a white group.
“I thought they might be Quaker at first, but the pews are arranged different in a Quaker church, and Mrs. Morton said the Quakers left Georgia long before the war. She figures they were Pentecostal of some sort.”