Ancient Eyes (14 page)

"I love you."

The vision passed into nausea so quickly Abraham was driven to his knees. His hands released the mantel as he dropped painfully to the wood of the floor and he clutched them before him, directly in the face of the fire. The pain passed, and he opened his eyes.

He knelt, clasped his hands, and stared into the dancing flames. They wavered, and he saw a dark mass within. It formed and reformed, blended with the flame, and then—for just an instant—he was staring at the stone church on the mountain. The flames danced around it, but it stood, strong and untouched in the center of that heat.

Abraham shook his head and staggered to his feet. He'd been too close to the fire and his skin was hot. Sweat dripped from his hair and face and stained his collar.
 
He brushed his fingers over his eyes to clear the perspiration and the salt of it stung.

"Where are you?" he asked very softly.

Then he turned away, walked to his mother's small bed, and lay down. There was nothing he could do until daylight. If she returned, he'd be waiting. If she didn't he knew where he had to go, and he knew better than to try going there before morning.

In the fireplace the flames danced, and outside the wind of the storm whistled through the eaves of the small cottage and drew deeper tones from the chimney.
 
Abe slept almost the second his head touched the pillow.
 
He didn't dream.

Sunlight poured slowly over the lip of the window and flooded the cottage. Abraham opened his eyes, blinked, and stared blankly at the unfamiliar walls. The fire had burned down to ash, and he was stiff from sleeping on the firm, thin mattress.
 
The events of the previous day, the storm, the old church, whatever or whoever had followed him through the trees and the empty cottage washed through him in an instant.

He sat up quickly, went to the front door, opened it, and stared out at the forested mountainside. He turned in each direction, looking for movements or any sign of life. In the distance he saw a small curl of white smoke, but other than that he might have been alone in the world.

He stepped back inside. There was only one place his mother might have gone at a time like this. He knew where he would find her. The old stone church was the only place other than the cottage where she would feel safe.

It didn't take long to gather his things, find some food to pack and carry along, and leave a note. It was possible he was wrong, and that she'd just gone to visit someone. She might walk into the house any minute, and if she did, he wanted her to know he had returned. He didn't say in his note that he was going to the church. She would know, and if someone else read what he wrote, there was no reason for him to give himself away before he'd had a chance to assess the situation.

He didn't lock the door. It hadn't been locked when he arrived, and if he was back by nightfall he didn't want to find himself locked out. No one on the mountain was likely to break into another's home.
 
There were plenty of bad apples, but it wasn't their way to intrude on another's property.
 
If you visited theirs uninvited you were likely to get shot, and they figured it was much the same with their neighbors, so folks kept to themselves.

It was warm. The sun drove the morning clouds into the distance and filtered in through the trees to flicker in dancing glimmers across the trail as he climbed. It was a beautiful day, but it had the same disjointed feel of the night before in his mother's cottage. He saw no one else, which wasn't odd.
 
No one lived on the side of the trail closest to the cottage. Only his parents had been confident enough in their faith to live so close to the white church, even after it had no pastor.
 
The trail divided the mountaintop cleanly, and Abe climbed up from the lower side.

It was all familiar in the way a dream of your childhood is familiar.
 
He knew where to turn. He remembered some of the rock formations, and noticed where a huge old oak he'd climbed as a boy was fallen by the road and revealed a slice of blue sky. Memories haunted the periphery of his thoughts at each turn and threatened to burst from the earth and the trees if he stared at one thing too long. He avoided those moments and climbed as quickly as possible.

It wasn't an easy trail.
 
His father had only been half joking when he'd told Abraham the climb was the first ritual of passage. When you communed with your Creator, it was a sacred time.
 
It was separate from the events and concerns of life, so the church had been separated as well, and placed as high up as they could get it—closer to God.

Abraham rounded the final twist in the trail and stopped. He saw the peaked roof of the squat stone building first. There was a very small steeple, mostly a symbolic addition, and it poked up through the branches toward the clouds. For no reason he could have explained, his heartbeat sped and a cool sheen of sweat tingled on his neck and his forehead.

He thought about calling out to his mother. If she were there, he didn't want to scare her by walking in too quietly.
 
He hesitated, and then started forward again. The sensation of being followed and watched itched at him again, and he couldn't bring himself to cry out. If she were there, he would find a way not to startle her when the time came. For now he held his silence.

The path itself was not as overgrown as he had expected it to be. It was obvious that not many had come this way in recent years, but still the trees kept their distance. The vines and shrubs found different directions to travel when they reached the edge of the trail. The earth was no longer as tightly packed as once it had been, but the way was clear.

Abe came to the edge of the churchyard and scanned the clearing. There was no sign that anyone else was there, or that they had been there recently.
 
The door swung on its hinges and dust swirled off the stone walk out front, caught in a light breeze.

Abe stepped up, glanced inside, and saw that the building was empty.
 
He turned and followed the stone trail around the left side of the church toward the gate to the graveyard. After all the years he'd worked to avoid the place, now he felt drawn. He wanted to see his father's grave—to touch the stone that marked the final resting place and to make peace with his past.

He stepped through the old gates without hesitation and strode down the center aisle of the tiny cemetery.
 
He didn't examine the other stones. As he approached, he noticed that there were footprints in the soft earth at the foot of his father's grave.
 
The sun had almost dried the mud, but a woman's prints were clearly visible, and Abraham knew they belonged to his mother. There would be time to find her, and to wonder why she had come here now, after all the time that had obviously passed since the last time anyone tended the graves, or repaired the church. There would be time to try and find what was lost in his past, and whether she could explain it to him in the present.

Abe knelt in that soft earth. The pendant brushed his skin beneath his shirt, and he reached up to grip it instinctively.
 
He read the inscription on the gravestone, counted the years of his father's life, and tried to associate his memories with the rectangular plot of ground and the weatherworn stone. He thought of the cracks and crevasses that had been his father's smile, the lines of laughter at the corner of those deep, perceptive eyes. The stone had cracks of its own, but they were not laugh lines, and they did not originate from his father.
 
If there were peace to be had between them, it wasn't waiting buried in this earth, surrounded by clinging vines and eroding slowly back to dust.

Abraham rose and turned, exiting the graveyard without looking back. He returned to the path, followed it past the gates of the graveyard, and into the woods, where it turned back up the mountain. The overgrowth was less forgiving on the upper path. Either someone had been clearing the churchyard occasionally, or something wanted to swallow all remnant of this second trail and cut the stone church off from the mountain's peak cleanly.
 
It was rough going, almost harder than walking through the trees to either side would have been, and the moment he crossed the threshold into the forest the world shifted again.

The disjointed, otherworldly sensation returned. His surroundings took on an ethereal, almost surreal quality, as if he'd left one world behind and entered another, darker place.

Roots snaked across the dirt trail and snatched at Abe's boots. Vines and whip-thin branches lashed his arms, and his face, no matter how carefully he made his way past them. Within a few minutes he was breathing harder and coated in a bright sheen of sweat from the effort.
 
He couldn't shake the sensation of resistance. Something didn't want him in the woods.
 
He was just about to turn back and return to the church in search of a hoe and an axe when he caught sight of his goal through a break in the trees.

He stopped short and stared. He gasped, and then cursed himself for the lack of control, but until that second he had been certain he'd find nothing but a pile of rubble. Instead, he saw the edge of a second stone roof through the waving branches.

The clearing wasn't more than a dozen yards away, but it might have been miles. The path disappeared into a snarl of greenery and hedges. Abraham started forward, but the hedges were thorny. They snatched at his clothing and cut his hands wherever he gripped them. He had rolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt up before climbing up to the old church. Now he rolled them back down and pulled his hands inside for what protection they could give. Carefully, one step at time, he pressed through.
 
Within moments, he was swallowed, front and back, in the clinging, stabbing branches, every motion tearing clothing or skin.

As he worked his way through the foliage, he could make out the walls beneath the stone roof. They were green with moss, but sound. The wall facing him had a single window in its center. He couldn't tell if the glass was intact or not, but every inch of that building that came into view drew him onward more powerfully.

Blood streamed down his wrists and soaked his shirt. His legs screamed with the pain of deep gouging cuts, but he couldn't stop. He pressed into the vines, and they wrapped him and clutched him, caressed him and cut him. His throat had grown very dry, and he had the sudden sensation that if he looked back over his shoulder, he would see nothing but green. No path, no trees, only more vines, and more thorns.

Sound rose around him. He thought it was the wind, or that he'd walked into another storm unaware, but sunlight poured down through the gaps in the trees above and the heat soaked moisture from him like a great solar sponge. There was no direction to the sound—it pressed in from all sides. As the vines and thorns tore at him and threatened to hold him immobile and bleeding the distant hint of laughter teased at his senses. There were words, as well, and a behind it all an insistent hiss.

Abraham was lightheaded with the heat. He stared up into the sun for a moment, then, as if slowly becoming aware of the glare and the pain in his eyes, he turned back toward the clearing. The static, hissing sound grew louder.
 
He brought his hands to his ears, tearing new stripes of blood and flesh with the motion. The sound was muted, and then gone, and he closed his eyes.

Less than six feet of hedge prevented him from entering the clearing. He knew this, but it did nothing to still the hammering of his heart, or to quiet the thoughts slamming through his mind. That sound. What was it? His mind conjured demons, and whirling clouds of insects that rose to blind him and drive him back from his goal. He was aware of the insanity inherent in these thoughts, and he fought it as he fought the rising panic.

His arms were above the worst of the hedge now—they'd torn free when he raised them to block the sound, but his legs were snarled, and he knew that if he moved too quickly, or lurched forward, that he would fall face first into the thorns.

Abraham opened his eyes. He breathed slowly and pulled his hands away from his ears. The hissing returned, but there was something familiar in the sound now.
 
He concentrated, trying to keep the blood pounding through his temple from crushing his thoughts before they took form. Something was wrong—something very real and very imminent, but he couldn't put his mental finger on it.

He studied the trees, and then lowered his chin and swept his gaze across the briars, vines, and hedges, wondering how they had come to be there—who had planted them. Surely they couldn't have randomly grown to block the path. And why had he plunged into them so eagerly? He tried to make out his ankles through the murky shadows in the undergrowth, and in that instant, he knew.
 
If anything, he froze more completely than he had been before.

Not a foot from his ankle, wavering in the air like a dark-skinned metronome, was a rattlesnake. The serpent's head wove back and forth with an eerie fluidity, tongue flickering red and wet between its gleaming fangs. It was not advancing, but Abe knew that if he moved quickly—maybe if he moved at all—it would strike.

He didn't know if he could back away without tripping.
 
His legs were hopelessly bound up in the vines and the lower branches of the hedge. Thorns dug into his flesh and promised new cuts regardless of what he did. His flannel shirt was damp with sweat and fresh blood. His arms, still held above the level of the thorns, ached with the effort.
 
His gaze locked with that of the snake, and he almost swayed in time—would have done so had it been possible in the forest's primordial grip.