while the black stars burn (16 page)

Behind the ancient Old One, Penny sensed a throng of its dark minions clamoring to taste what their master scorned as unripe fruit. She turned and beheld her own planet as they did: an insignificant backwater world populated by craven, base gangs of over-proud apes...and none, perhaps, quite so abominable as the hooded figures who surrounded her body in the church.

In the back of her mind, she could hear the Reverend’s incantation intensify, and she felt the power of the stars themselves flood into her soul, her mind. Penny realized that she was the goddess of all who existed or who would ever exist on planet Earth, the ultimate Angel of Death for a species that seemed as eternally doomed and insignificant as a nest of ants in some forgotten desert. She could end all the pointless struggle and war and striving with a single thought, and the human race would become fuel for the beings who were by far their cosmic superiors.

The cosmic energy flowing into her was enough to open a portal in the stained glass window and allow the hungry minions to swarm across the countryside, first toward Bucktown, and then the rest of the world.

Dost thou wish it?
Asked the minions.

The human animal in her—the part of her that wanted to jump when she found herself at great heights, the part that delighted when misfortune befell the bullies at her school—that part wanted to tell them “yes” and open the portal.

Why should they survive when Mother is dust?
it asked her.

But another part, the part that was capable of performing demanding music and the coldest of equations, the part that would not gibber in terror no matter what horrors the old gods showed her, had a better idea.

“I do not wish it.”

The minions turned away, indifferent, Penny instantly forgotten.

Penny closed her eyes against the stars and let the power of the Reverend’s spell explode out of her every pore. Her body became a temporary sun. She heard the Reverend’s keeper shriek a moment before it was incinerated along with its puppet. The Klan members had no time to scream before they burst into ash along with the wood and rock of the church.

When Penny opened her eyes, she found herself lying on her back at the bottom of a blasted, scorched crater, her cosmic energies spent. Nothing but she had survived.

The Girl With the Star-Stained Soul

Dazed, Penny stumbled through the gray ash and blasted debris. Charred human fat stained the fractured rocks of the old stone church. Blackened bones jumbled with the splintered charcoal of the pine roof beams. Most all the men of Fensmere, Mississippi lay dead around her, and many of its womenfolk, too. She spied a bit of wrought iron candelabra here, a burned scrap of a Klansman’s hood there.

She looked up at the broken wall where the skylight had been, and the Reverend Haughton’s order reverberated in her mind:
“Brothers, place her beneath the stars!”

The girl shuddered and hugged herself as she remembered the cold touch of the old gods probing her mind, examining the Earth through her memory and dismissing her world as unripe fruit. But their thronging dark minions had clamored to devour the planet, and Penny had seen through the old gods’ eyes what terrible, craven, worthless creatures humankind was, and the darkest power of the cosmos had flowed into her, and she could have opened the doorway to let the minions in to end it all.

And for a moment, she’d considered it. It’s what the Reverend—her own grandfather—had brought her here to do. Exactly a month after Penny’s mother’s death, the Reverend’s sister brought her to the family mansion for the summer under the guise of a family reunion. Instead, the Haughtons wrenched her mind open with the mad Arab’s book, drugged her and kept her penned like a sacrificial calf until the night that the stars were right.

And she’d almost done it. She’d almost opened the door and let in creatures that would almost certainly end humanity. In those moments, she’d been the most powerful person on the planet, a living goddess, and yet still nothing more than a child trying to decide whether to open the latch for the stranger on her parents’ porch.

Instead, she’d chosen to use the cosmic power surging through her to turn her body into a momentary sun. And with the coldest blood, she blasted the Invisible Empire cultists gathered around her to ashes.

Penny couldn’t stop shivering. Her own mind had been overlaid with a new dark consciousness, a terrible inhuman logic. Was she a puppet now? A servant of one of the old gods that had briefly gazed upon her as a man might gaze upon a mote of dust? No, she finally decided. Her mind had been left to its own devices. But the cosmic fires had forged her soul into something new, and she was a stranger to herself.

And in that moment of realization, two things occurred to her simultaneously.

The first was that the Haughtons had almost certainly engineered her mother’s fatal automobile crash. It could be no accident that the one adult in her life who’d kept her safe had been removed right when Penny was old enough for the ritual. They had the money and resources to make it happen, and it had been done. Her cold new overmind shone a light on her past, and Penny realized they’d probably arranged to have her father murdered, too.

The second thing Penny realized was that, had her nuclear physicist father lived, and had her mother not remarried a Christian man when Penny was just a toddler, she might be having her bat mitzvah this summer instead. Her parents would have thrown her a big party with cake and Peach Melba and all the friends Penny didn’t have in her current life would have come to celebrate her becoming a daughter of the commandment under Jewish tradition. And her father would have given thanks that he could no longer be punished for her sins.

“I’m responsible now,” she said to the dead who lay scattered around her, and she threw back her head and laughed, spinning in circles with her arms outstretched in the cold moonlight. “I’m responsible for everything!”

She spun and laughed and laughed and spun amongst the dust and bones and soon she was wailing, weeping to the stars that hung deaf and mute and harsh.

“Miss Penny!” a woman exclaimed.

The girl stopped spinning, blinking in bright headlights, and wiped at the muddy tracks her tears had made in the ashes on her cheeks.

“Who’s there?” she called back.

Three figures stepped out of an old Hudson sedan, and when they came into the light she recognized Georgia and her daughter Bessie, both servants at the Haughton’s mansion. The third was a strong-looking man a few years younger than Georgia, and they looked enough alike in face and build that Penny guessed they were kin. Penny knew Georgia and Bessie couldn’t afford a car, so she guessed the truck belonged to him.

“Who are you?” she asked him.

“Name’s Jay. I’m—I’m Georgia’s brother.” He was staring at his battered work boot, clearly averting his gaze. It was only then that Penny realized that her dress had been burned off in the blast.

The Klan would lynch any Negroes found in Fensmere after dark, so Georgia and her family had taken a terrible risk coming to the old stone church...unless they’d been pretty sure the Klansmen were all dead. Penny guessed that blowing up the church made a bit of noise.

“Miss Penny, oh my goodness, where are your clothes?” Georgia fussed. “Bessie, go get the blanket!”

“Yes’m.”

“But naked’s better than dead, isn’t that right?” Penny asked, fixing Georgia in a pointed stare, remembering the cups of drugged tea that Bessie had slipped through the food slot during her imprisonment in the mansion. “You knew damned well they meant for me to die here. And you didn’t do anything to stop them.”

“Miss Penny, I know you’re angry.” Georgia’s voice shook. “But understand, we did as much as we could. Morinda can’t be bothered to do nothin’ on her own—she had me brew up the tea and I changed the recipe so your mind would be able to stand everything they put you through. I know we still put you in harm’s way...but if we’d done more they’d have found out and lynched me and Bessie and probably burned a few houses in Bucktown as a warning.”

“Changed it?” Penny replied, remembering the medicinal bitterness of the tea.

Bessie padded up with an old cotton blanket. Penny took it and wrapped it around herself.

“How did you know to change it?” Penny asked.

“This ain’t the first time the Haughtons did this. They tried it with your momma back when she was just a few years older than you. A hoodoo woman from New Orleans come up to warn us what they planned to do, and she showed me what herbs to switch in and out. Your momma was able to hold off the star-devils when they put her on the cross, and we reckoned that if we made the tea right and said our prayers, you’d do the same.”

The old theatre downtown,
Penny thought.
So
that’s
how it burned down
.

“Is the Reverend dead?” Georgia asked, looking anxious. “We need to know. If that evil old buzzard survived—”

“My grandfather is dead. Aunt Morinda, too,” Penny replied. “Come see.”

She led them over to a blasted corpse that still wore purple silk tatters of a Grand Dragon’s robes. The fractured remains of a black, crablike creature still nested in his hipbones. Just as dead as the Reverend.

“Oh Jesus, what’s that?” Bessie breathed, and her uncle muttered a prayer under his breath.

Georgia inhaled sharply but didn’t react in terror like the other two; Penny figured that the older woman had either seen the abomination, or had guessed that it existed.

“It controlled him like a puppeteer,” Penny said. “But I think he was perfectly willing to be used by it.”

She turned to Georgia. “You said my mother wouldn’t open a portal to the stars?”

Georgia shook her head. “She shut ‘em down like you did. Only she just set a fire, and most everyone escaped.”

“Then where did this thing come from?” Penny asked.

“I reckon he didn’t have it before he went on that expedition in Arabia and came back with all those relics, like that evil book they left for you to find,” Georgia replied.

“We better check the house,” Penny replied, staring down at the broken black shell and curled arachnoid legs. “The thing about spiders and cockroaches is that if you see one, there’s almost always another one somewhere.”

Georgia nodded. “I recollect the movers brought in a lot of big crates, and they took them down to the basement. Morinda forbade me from going down there. I didn’t want a caning so I never disobeyed her, but I know where she hides the key.”

*

Early the next morning, Georgia let the four of them into the musty old mansion. Penny wore a clean shift and pair of Mary Janes she’d borrowed from Bessie. Jay carried a burlap sack laden with pry bars, rope, matches, candles, and a couple of flashlights.

“The Sherriff and his deputies were all Klan,” she said as she shut the heavy oak doors behind them. “So I reckon they died at the church along with everything else. Everybody in Bucktown knows to sit tight. But some of the Fensmere womenfolk got left at home with their kids; sooner or later the state police will come ‘round here asking questions. So we best find what we gonna find before then.”

Nobody, it seemed, wanted to go to the cellar right away. So they went up to the Reverend’s rooms on the third floor and searched every closet, drawer, and wardrobe. They found nothing out of the ordinary but some strange and oddly cold figurines carved from black stone. Every time Penny touched one, her mind flashed back on some horror she’d glimpsed among the stars.

“I think we have to go to the basement,” Penny said, trying to work the feeling back into her numbed fingers.

Once they descended the long, curving staircase, they found themselves in a hidden warehouse beneath the mansion. Old-fashioned gaslights guttered in sconces on the walls. Penny surveyed the boxes and old furniture with dismay; almost any number of creatures could be hiding down here.

But she realized that the hairs were standing up on the backs of her arms, and she could feel a low humming vibration from somewhere further into the basement. Penny led the others toward the faint sound, and they found an ancient Middle Eastern temple built from blocks and columns of black basalt crouched on the concrete floor. It was maybe fifteen feet tall, the peak of the terraced roof nearly flush with the basement ceiling, and probably twenty feet wide along each side.

The only thing upon it that was not a flat, oppressive black was a single bronze door at the top of a short flight of steps. Upon the gleaming metal was some strange symbol wrought from shining gold. When she gazed upon it, Penny shivered as she had amongst the dead cultists at the old stone church, and she guessed that whatever language it was written in was not one humans could comprehend.

“This thing gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Jay said as they carefully circled the temple.

“They must have brought it in pieces and put it back together down here,” Georgia said. “I don’t see but the one door in or out.”

“I’ll go in,” Penny said, responding to the others’ unspoken question.

She might find nothing but darkness and dust inside the temple, but she could also find something that would utterly destroy her. In the back of her mind, she knew she hadn’t yet come to grips with having slaughtered most of the town. They’d surely had it coming, but it was all still a sin on a massive scale, wasn’t it? Even knowing the gods in the universe cared nothing at all for the human race wasn’t enough to take the sting of guilt from what she’d done. Because if there was no gentle afterlife to hope for, then that meant the life here on Earth was the most precious thing of all. If her mind ever fully felt the gravity of the lives she’d snuffed out and the orphans she’d created, she wasn’t sure that she’d care to go on living.

So, she would leave her fate to the black temple. She’d fight for her life, but if she wasn’t strong enough to fend off whatever lurked inside, she’d take death as her due.

“Just...don’t leave me down here, okay?” Penny added. “Wait for me to come back.”