Chapter Fifty-Five Ashley
FIFTY-FIVE ASHLEY
They ran, stumbling over roots, faces scratched and torn by branches, clothing catching on brambles. They did not know where they were going. Ashley was sure she heard hoofbeats in the distance, following, getting closer. She did not turn to look.
The sun was setting fast behind the mountains to the west. The air felt cold and dangerous and carried the smell of woodsmoke and rotten leaves.
She led them down trails that snaked through the woods, past skeletal trees bare of branches, white birches glowing like ghosts.
When she came to forks and turns, she guessed at which way to go.
At last, she passed a stand of tall, straight red pines that seemed familiar.
They were near Mini’s house. Ash crept out toward the road, Mal behind her.
They could see people down in the street, out on their front porches, shaking their heads.
“Holy shit,” Mal whispered. “Look. A bunch of houses got the mark.”
“Come on,” said, Ash, pulling him along through trees to Main Street. It was the same there: it seemed every other house had a crudely painted red horse head on it. Even Loon’s Call Pub had been marked.
“What the hell is happening?” Mal asked, voice high and panicked.
“I don’t know,” Ash admitted, heart hammering as she pulled him back into the shadows.
They stood still, watching. More and more people were venturing out of their houses to look at the marks on their doors, on the doors of their neighbors.
They spoke in low, worried buzzing tones.
Some of the women and children were crying.
Their fear was a living, palpable thing that seemed to be reaching out with tendrils, brushing Ashley’s cheek, making her cold all over.
“We need to leave. Now,” Mal whispered fiercely. “I say we cut back through the woods, follow the road as closely as we can while staying hidden, go up the hill the way we came when we drove into town yesterday.”
Ash nodded. Could they really make it out of the valley on foot? The next town was miles and miles away over rough terrain. But what choice did they have?
“Yes, okay. But there’s something we need to do first.”
Ash grabbed his hand, pulled him back to the path that looped off Mini’s road—the one they had taken to the cemetery.
Ash followed it, picking her way through the growing darkness, walking slowly, her right arm behind her as she held tight to her brother’s hand.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Shh,” she warned. She could see the church through the trees, the white steeple looming up into the dark-purple sky. They were approaching from the back. She pointed.
“We need to get into the church office. Cheryl said they keep all kinds of records there—births, deaths, burials. There might be something about what they did to Mom, and we’re going to need evidence.”
Malcolm looked miserable. “Jesus Christ, Ash. Isn’t the fact that we found her bag enough? And if we don’t get out of here right now—”
She cut him off. “I’m going in. I’ll be quick, I promise. You can wait here if you want.” She pulled her hand away from his and ran, crouched over, down the path to the church parking lot. There were no cars in the lot and the windows of the church were dark.
Mal followed her. “Ash,” he whispered. “Please. This is crazy.”
Still crouching low, she sprinted across the parking lot and up the steps to the two large front doors of the church. They were unlocked. Mal came up behind her.
They stepped inside. The doors opened into a narrow vestibule, with stairs that she guessed led up to the steeple and bell.
Beyond the entryway were rows of pews, an altar at the front.
The church was dark and smelled of old wood, incense, and the bitter herbs of the sachet Mini had been wearing around her neck.
They moved toward the front of the church where the pulpit was, behind it a large carved wooden crucifix.
There was no ornate stained glass, just a simple round window above the crucifix, letting in the last purplish light of dusk.
The crucifix itself was one of the gruesome ones, Christ’s eyes half open under his crown of thorns, blood dripping from the nails at his hands and feet.
Ash climbed a couple of steps to the sanctuary and passed the altar where Christ loomed. There was a door on the right with a small metal sign helpfully labeled OFFICE. It led to a small but tidy room with a desk, chair, and floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Dozens of old leather-bound volumes filled one of the shelves. They were unmarked, but Ashley gravitated to them immediately, pulled one down at random, flipped it open. Mal found a switch and turned on the light.
“Bingo! This one’s from the eighteen-seventies!
” Malcolm came and looked over her shoulder.
The small, fussy, old-fashioned cursive was in faded brown ink, with blotches here and there, but it was largely legible.
The page she’d opened to was headed May 1874 and listed in chronological order every event of note for that month.
Babies were born, marriages were sanctified, residents died, each documented in a single, simple line: 16th—Mary Boone, 43, death, consumption.
23rd—Robert Osbourne, infant son of Joseph and Abigail, baptized.
They pulled down a few more volumes before they found the one that contained 1918 and 1919.
“Look at all these deaths in the fall of 1918,” she said, pointing at a list of names followed by death, Spanish flu.
She turned a few pages to the spring of 1919 and found another list of names.
The notes next to these names were chilling: death, demonic possession.
“Um, the cause of death was… demonic possession?” Mal stared down at the neat cursive.
She felt sick to her stomach. The room seemed to lurch.
Mal pulled down the volume on the far right, which had the entries up to the current day.
They flipped to the page for October 2014. It listed the harvest festival, a marriage, and two births. Nothing about Anna O’Brien’s death or the town hall burning down.
Nothing about their mother.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ashley said.
Directly opposite the office, on the other side of the crucifix, Ashley noticed a nook they’d missed on the way in. It contained some kind of altar, with a large painting above it.
A Lorelei Prentice original.
They moved toward the nook, compelled. Malcolm flipped on the flashlight on his phone. The altar consisted of a heavy table topped with a large rectangular box. The box was surrounded by offerings: votive candles in glass jars, piles of coins, ears of corn, a bottle of liquor, pieces of jewelry.
On the wall above the altar hung a watercolor portrait, obviously the work of Lorelei because the proportions were wrong: a man with shaggy dark curls, a bushy beard, and dark eyes.
He wore a long hooded coat and held a knife in one hand, a horse skull in the other.
His fingers were too long, hands misshapen, face too big for his body, one eye looking off in the distance while the other stared straight at them.
Two photographs flanked the portrait. The one on the left was a copy of a picture Ashley recognized from the pub: the blurry photo of a bearded man driving a cart with a dead horse sprawled in the back.
The photo on the right was an old sepia-toned formal portrait of the man in the painting.
Ash made a little choking sound.
She recognized the man in the photo, though it was impossible.
“That’s… me?” Mal said.
But Ash wasn’t looking at the painting or photos anymore. They were up against the box that lay on the altar, which she saw now was topped with a clear glass lid. Inside the sealed case was the skeleton of a man with a stained horse skull where his head should be.
“It’s him,” she said, staring down into the creature’s dark, empty eye sockets.