“But why on earth?”
“When the world moves forward too fast for some people, they try to pull us all back with their fear,” Will explained. “Let’s hope they remain at the fair. I’d hate to think what would happen if they should discover us exhuming the body of their prophet’s son.”
On the right side of the road, where trees with bark like skinned knees stood guard, Evie spied an animal-skin charm branded with the familiar pentacle hanging from a scraggly branch. Mechanically, she drew the flap of her coat across her bare neck. “I think we’re getting close.”
“There’s the twined oak.” Jericho pointed to a massive tree whose gnarled limbs had come together in a strange ballet of twisting bark.
Will angled the car off the road and into the clearing, parking it behind a still-lush thicket and saying, “Hopefully these bushes will obscure our presence long enough.”
From the trunk Will retrieved a kerosene camping lantern, which he lit and keyed to a soft glow; a flashlight for Evie; and two shovels, one of which he handed to Jericho. As he did so, Evie was reminded of their grim purpose. Will shouldered his shovel and lifted the lantern toward the imposing wooded mountainside ahead. “This way,” he said, leading them up the hill over a faint scar of dirt path. The hazy, dying light lent the woods a deep grayness. Evie tried to picture young John Hobbes living in such isolation, away from the welcoming fires of taverns and the fence-post talk of neighbors, these woods his only companion.
It was straight uphill, and Evie’s legs protested the climb. She was glad she’d worn sensible shoes. The air thinned, making each breath more of an effort. She glanced behind them and could no longer see the Ford in its hiding spot.
“How… much… farther?” Evie panted out. Her muscles screamed.
“Almost,” Will answered, just as breathless.
Almost magically, the path evened out, flattened. It wound around a jutting face of hillock and the little breath left in Evie’s lungs caught.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Old Brethren,” Will said in a hushed voice.
They’d come upon the abandoned ruins of the old camp. A handful of moldering log cabins were spread out in the clearing. A splintered door hung open on rusted hinges; its dark, empty windows gave it the appearance of a skull house. Weeds sprang up around the stone carcass of a well. A stone path was still somewhat visible beneath the cover of leaves and clover. It wound through the mist-shrouded trees. To their left, the sound of the river mingled with the chirruping of crickets and birds. Evie’s flashlight reflected in the eyes of a fox, making her jump. The fox skittered back to safety; the flashlight shook in her hand.
“The old church,” Will said, making quickly for a large square in the center where a raggedy mess of charred timber lay in silent testament like a mausoleum. Carefully, Evie stepped over the splintered threshold, ticklish with tall weeds, and into the remains of the church. In all their late-night philosophical wranglings about the nature of evil, nothing had prepared her for the feel of it, the actual weight of some hungry wickedness pressed against her bare skin. For the old church of Brethren carried within its decay the unmistakable heft and patient persistence of evil. Under the wind, she could nearly make out a child’s laugh, a swell of moans, a threat of whispers. She wanted to run. But where was there to run? What place lay beyond the reach of evil?
Piles of crumbling bricks formed a semicircle in one corner, and Evie recognized it as the fire pit she’d seen when she’d held John Hobbes’s ring. It was nothing but a blackened trough now, the bricks gone gray and slick with moss. Just behind it in the grass lay a branding iron. Evie picked it up delicately. The Pentacle of the Beast. She dropped it quickly, startling a tiny grass snake slithering out from under a pile of stones. Evie peered into the abandoned pit and saw fresh kindling, half nubs of candles. Someone had used it recently. Her heartbeat quickened at the thought of who or what could be out there in those woods.
“They’re still using it as a meetinghouse,” Will said, as if reading her thoughts. He pointed to the arrangement of flat rocks placed in a circle around a tin sign. With his shoe, he nudged the sign over. The back was also adorned with the five-pointed star and snake.
Will gazed up at the fading light. “Let’s find that grave.”
Dusk fell quickly now. The woods were shrouded in dark-blue shadow. A half coin of gauzy moon appeared as they walked beyond the burned church and down the hill. The low stone wall of the graveyard appeared in the light of Will’s lantern. Behind it, blackened gravestones tilted like crooked teeth in a rotting mouth. Evie shone the flashlight from stone to stone, trying to read the names there. Jedidiah Blake. Richard Jean. Mary Schultz. Each gravestone bore the inscription HE WILL RISE.