Ancient Eyes (8 page)

Something clutched at his heart and he lunged. She saw the motion, and, obviously spooked, skittered off her side of the bed and away.
 
Abe grabbed the phone off its hook, ignored her, and spoke with a shaky voice.

"Hello?" Only static replied. "Who is it?" Katrina asked. Her voice shook. "Who is this?" Abe asked. There was no reply.
 
Moments later there was a loud click, and the line went dead. As the dial tone cut back in, Abe hung the phone up and laid his face on the sheets, dazed. Then, very slowly, he released the breath he hadn't even been aware he was holding and rolled to his back. He covered his eyes with one arm. For the second night in a row he'd awakened bathed in sweat, and this time the dream wouldn't let go.
 
He couldn't shake the sensation of flight. The images of the dream remained as vivid as if they were memories, and he didn't even try to speak until he heard soft footsteps and felt the bed shift slightly.

Katrina touched his arm tentatively, and he pulled it slowly from his eyes and met her gaze.

"What happened?" she asked.

"I had a nightmare," he answered. "It was worse than before, and not like anything I've ever experienced."

"Who was on the phone?" she asked, still not getting too close to him.

"I have no idea," he sighed. "Whoever it was didn't say a thing. It was probably just a wrong number, but I guess it freaked me out after waking up like that. I mean, who would call us at this hour?"

He saw from the way she watched him that she only half believed him. Abraham raised himself slowly, fluffed his pillow behind his back and held out his arms to her. She watched him for a moment, and then slid onto the bed and into his arms.
 
Once they made contact, she was suddenly pressed tightly to his side, and he curled her into a tight embrace. Her hair tickled his nose and chin, and he buried his face in it. They stayed that way a long time, then, very suddenly, she pulled back—not out of his embrace, but far enough to pound her fist hard on his chest. She hit him again and was rearing back for a third shot when he grabbed her wrist and stopped her.

"You promised," she said.
 
Her voice was hoarse, and he knew she was fighting back tears. "You promised you would never keep secrets from me, but you are. These dreams—that letter that came today—the phone call. You know what all of it is about."

She wasn't asking, and Abe knew better than to try and slip past her guard. He nodded slowly.

"I'm not sure where to start," he said. "I've never talked to anyone about any of this, and I thought I'd left it all far enough behind me that I'd never have to. It isn't that I was keeping secrets, Kat," he stroked her hair and pulled her close again, though she was a little stiffer in his arms, particularly at this last.
 
He continued as if he hadn't noticed, determined to get through it now that he'd started. "It's that I hoped it would just go away, like the bad dreams. And it did, even the dreams were gone, but now they're back."

Abe reached down and lifted the leather thong with its dangling, equal-armed cross pendant. He fingered it absently, and feeling the motion, Katrina glanced up and watched him.

"Your father gave you that," she said.

Abe nodded. "This and a lot of other things, including some that I didn't want.
 
He gave me the dreams, and unless I'm wrong about all of this, it's because of him that it's all come back to haunt me now."

"But," Kat lifted her head from his chest and stared at him, "you told me your father was dead."

"He is," Abe nodded, still fingering the medallion.
 
"He died before I left the mountain. My mother is still there." He hesitated, still staring at the medallion and turning it over and over in his hands. "I wasn't sure of that until I got the letter."

He held the small cross still,
its
rough, hand-molded contours catching the light from the bedside lamp and glittering softly. Abe turned to face Kat.

"My father wore this until the day he died. My mother gave it to me after his funeral. She told me he wanted me to have it—that I needed it, but she didn't tell me why. Not then. In fact, she didn't tell me until just before I left the mountain for good."

"You shouldn't have to have a reason for owning something of your father's," she chided him softly.

"I have other things of my father's," Abe replied.
 
"This isn't a gift, it's an anchor.
 
It's like wearing a big psychic weight around my neck, and every time I turn in any direction but toward that mountain, I feel it drawing me back. I've taken it off dozens of times. I even had it in an envelope once, ready to mail it to her and forget about it forever, but something always happened to distract me, or to change my mind. In the early days, holding this and praying was the only way I could escape the dreams."

"You've never been back?" she asked.
 
"You haven't called and talked to your mother?"

"There are only about half a dozen phones on the entire mountain," he laughed. "My mother would have no way to get the message, unless she went down to Greene's Store and paid to use his phone. If she'd done that, the old buzzard would have hovered over her shoulder and listened in on every word.

"Things are different up there.
 
If you drive up to Friendly, it's pretty rustic, but if you take the fork past Greene's, you hit a long stretch of nothing, and shortly after that you'd be hard pressed to prove to yourself you weren't in another universe."

"But," Katrina frowned, trying to picture it, "how do they live? What do they do?"

"The same things folks on that mountain have done since the Spaniards first came to California and people started to settle. Some of them farm; there are grapes on the side of the mountain. Others raise goats and livestock, pigs, chickens—some do sewing, hunt and fish. You'd be surprised what you can get by on once you get yourself out away from the cities and the rules of modern society.
 
They get an occasional sheriff up there, and now and then a Highway Patrol car braves the potholes in the road, but for the most part the people on that mountain might as well not exist to the world down here. I suppose that will change one day."

He stared off into the shadows for a moment, thinking.
 
His fingers continued to work over the surface of the coin, tracing the patterns again and again. Then he snapped back to the moment.

"Then again," he said, "maybe not. There are things about that mountain that defy description. There are stories I have never told anyone because when I tell them to myself, they sound ridiculous and surreal. I have memories that I could be convinced were nothing but delusions, or dreams. At least, you could have convinced me a few days ago."

Katrina stared at him, waiting for more. He saw the confusion in her eyes and closed his own, trying to settle the memories, and the roiling mass of questions that had surfaced over the past two days, into something he could tell her that would make sense.

"There were two churches on the mountain when I was a boy," he said at last.
 
"One was my father's.
 
It was the highest thing on the mountain that I ever saw, except one. There were peaks that reached further, but I never climbed them, and I don't believe anyone I knew ever did either.
 
The church was like a boundary, cutting us off on the upper reaches.
 
The other church was lower, the furthest thing down toward the back road out of that part of the hills. I came out past it when I left."

Above my father's church there was a place he used to go.
 
It was a small stone cottage, so old that no one remembers who built it—what kind of people they were, or even if we descended from them. It was just there, had always been there. The church was the same. We kept it up, put in a stone walkway and built some trellises around the graveyard behind it, but none of us knew how long it stood there—not even my father.
 
I asked him, but he only knew the history back as far as it had been recorded in writing.

"That was more than 150 years, and he believed from the words recorded in those early times that the church was old when they were written. We will probably never know, and I don't think it's important.
 
The last time I saw that church was his funeral."

"Tell me," Kat said.
 
She'd caught the hesitation in his voice, and he bit back the sharp reply that threatened. He didn't want to tell her.
 
He didn't want to think about that place, or that day.

"It was a very long time ago," he began slowly, "but I remember it as if it happened yesterday."

Abraham had not thought of that old church, or of his father, in longer than he'd been willing to admit to himself, let alone to another. His father's funeral was a memory of darkness and mourning. He remembered sitting between his mother and his Uncle Keith on the bench in the church. They'd brought in the preacher from Friendly, California, Reverend Forbes; a skinny, stick of a man with wavy hair and wild eyes. He'd glared at them from the front of the church as if they'd all been caught masturbating in a closet, not like a man of God who was troubled over the loss of a fallen comrade. Abraham had spent every Sunday of his life in that small stone church, and the sensations Reverend Forbes brought with him had felt as alien and impossible as the loss of his father.

That preacher stared them into silence and began to speak. He began while they were still coming in the doors. He had his Bible in his hand, like he was afraid that if he let it touch the old stone pulpit of Abraham's father's church, it would be contaminated.
 
He shook it at them. He fanned the air with it, and he gripped it white-knuckle tight in the dying light of the later afternoon sun, but he did not let it touch the stone.
He
did not touch the stone. If he could have floated above the floor, Abraham was sure he would have done so.

Reverend Forbes did not talk about Jonathan Carlson at all. He railed against sinners everywhere, the tone of his voice showing clearly that he felt that everything beyond his own church in Friendly became steadily more evil, and that Satan's blood dripped down the sides of the mountain, infecting all of those below with his darkness.

There were reasons for his words, of course. Some of the meaning had been clear to Abraham, even then.
 
The stone chapel was not the only church close by, and though there was no one preaching at that other, there was no longer anyone preaching at this one either.
 
No one that belonged.

Both houses of worship lay empty, waiting for God, or someone, to fill the pulpits and draw the people. Between those times they would live beyond the sight of God, unless of course they wanted to find their way further up the mountain to Friendly every Sunday. Reverend Forbes mentioned that too. He'd been very concerned for their souls.

It was obvious early in the ceremony that he had not known Reverend Jonathan Carlson, and equally obvious he did not count this as a spiritual loss. He intimated that God had begun to cleanse the mountain. He spoke of shadows hovering beyond the sight of civilized men, waiting to sweep in and blot out the light of the Lord's love.
 
He talked for what seemed hours, though in retrospect, Abraham knew his mother and the others gathered would not have stood for that, even if he did frighten them. It had probably lasted no more than an hour.

The words had poured around Abraham in a meaningless jumble. He'd sat huddled up against his mother, who sat numb and motionless, staring through the preacher and the back wall of the church as if gazing into the pits of hell. Abraham was used to his mother being close and far away at the same time. He was used to her mumbling words he couldn't understand, or starting from her seat and crying out when nothing had happened. He was used to the stares of his neighbors, and the quiet disapproval of his family.

Jonathan Carlson had been loved and respected, but Sarah Carlson had never been welcome on the mountain. She was not one of them; her beliefs were not their beliefs. More than once Abraham had heard it whispered that she belonged more with that other church—that other preacher.
  
The one who'd led the congregation at the white church. They said she dragged Jonathan Carlson into the shadows, and now, with his body not even in its grave, their enmity bubbled to the surface.

When the spew of fire and brimstone finally burned itself out, they trickled outside. Reverend Forbes, looking exceedingly uncomfortable in the bright sunshine, hovered in the back corner of the small graveyard. They had brought Jonathan Carlson's body around slowly, his box built of the same rough-hewn wood they used in the church—taken from the mountain, and returned to it—as was their way.

Reverend Forbes said nothing, but his mood darkened. His brow knotted with furrows of disdain and his lip quivered with the desire to scream at them all. Abraham saw it in the man's eyes, and the shaking palsied grip he kept on his Bible, which he brought no closer to the vines or flowers of the graveyard than he had to the stone of the church itself. Something in the moment kept him quiet. Maybe it was the grim, solemn faces of the men who carried the casket. Maybe it was the dark,
shawled
and hooded silence of the women, or the whisper of the wind mocking them from the tree branches and filling in words where all of them disdained speech.