Ancient Eyes
By David Niall Wilson
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2010 by David Niall Wilson
Cover Design by Neil Jackson
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NOVELS:
Stargate Atlantis – SGA-15 – Brimstone (With Patricia Lee Macomber)
NOVELLAS:
The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature
'
Scuse
Me, While I Kiss the Sky
COLLECTIONS:
The Fall of the House of Escher & Other Illusions
The Whirling Man& Other Tales of Pain, Blood, and Madness
UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:
Roll Them Bones
/
Deep Blue
/
The Orffyreus Wheel
/
The Not Quite Right Reverend Cletus J. Diggs & The Currently Accepted Habits of Nature
/
Heart of a Dragon
/
On the Third Day
/
This is My Blood
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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 scrape 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 glass 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 passing 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 space 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.
