Chapter 18 #2
After seeing the picture online, I’m shocked by how much she’s aged in just a handful of years.
She can’t be any older than her early fifties, by my timeline, but she looks much older.
Shrunken, somehow. Her hair is short and wispy, her eyes sunken, her expression vacant as she stares out the window. But then she turns to me and smiles.
“Willow,” she says.
“I’ll give you two some privacy,” the nurse says quietly, nodding at me without noticing my shock. “Come find me if you have any questions.”
I’m frozen in place as the door clicks shut behind me.
The apparent recognition in Rachel’s eyes leaves me unmoored.
The nurse didn’t tell me what’s wrong with her.
It could be Alzheimer’s, or another cognitive condition, leaving her confused.
My discomfort grows; I shouldn’t have come here.
Shouldn’t have bothered this poor woman with the past.
I’m about to blurt out an excuse and leave when Rachel says, “Little Willow Ashford. It really is you, isn’t it?”
The name is like a bucket of cold water over my head. My mouth gapes for a moment before I correct, automatically, “Hawkins. Willow Hawkins.” A second later my mind catches up, and I say, “Wait, you…?”
“Remember you? Of course. Come closer, darling. What have you done to your hair? Oh, it was so lovely and fair before. And that makeup, those clothes, my goodness. All that black…” She frowns, beckoning me closer with one brittle hand.
I step forward automatically, still numb with shock.
She takes my hand between two of hers, her smile returning as she looks up at me.
“I was confused, at first, when I heard the name,” she says.
“But then the nurse mentioned Cain, and I knew. I knew he had sent you.”
My mouth opens and shuts, but I can’t seem to speak.
“I knew they would come for me eventually,” she says. Her grip tightens on my hand; she’s surprisingly strong, despite how frail she looks. “They promised— They promised me—” She cuts off, racked by a fit of coughing that makes her entire body shake.
“The Children of the Red Sun?” I ask.
Her spine goes rigid, and a shudder goes through her body.
“Hush, girl,” she snaps between coughs. And in that moment, with that phrase, recognition finally hits me.
A memory of a fair-haired woman with a Bible in her lap, reading aloud to a room full of huddled children.
She was there. She was part of the cult.
I knew her. “You know better than to speak that name in public.” Her eyes dart around the room, and she licks her lips.
My mind races. Cain’s mother was part of the cult, but she didn’t die with them. She must have left beforehand. Because she was pregnant with him, perhaps. “No, you don’t understand. I’m not here because of that. They’re not coming.”
Her grip on me tightens further, her nails digging into my skin until I wince.
“But— I did what they asked. I did everything that they asked. The ritual, the beast, the child. I raised him. I kept him safe. They said they’d come back for me.”
Her words are so rapid-fire that they take a moment to sink in. It isn’t fear quickening her words; it’s hope. She wants me to be one of the cult members here for her.
And a worse hint of truth is buried there, too. The ritual. The beast. The child.
Cain.
I take a deep breath. Though I want to pull away from her in revulsion, I squeeze her hand instead, forcing a smile as I lean down over the bed. “They’re not coming yet, I meant. But soon. It’s almost time.”
Her grip eases, her tense expression going slack with relief. “I knew it. I knew they wouldn’t abandon me.”
“Of course not. Not after what you did for them.”
She nods so quickly, I almost fear her narrow neck will snap. “Yes. Yes. I’ve kept up the faith, you know. Tell him I have.” She releases me to point a wavering hand at the table beside her bed.
The wooden box sitting there is identical to the one from my mother, kept in my nightstand. I swallow as I walk over, flipping it open. Within is a Bible, a rosary, and a collection of polaroids rubber-banded together.
“I see,” I murmur. “I’ll let him know.” I keep my back to her as I carefully remove the band and flip through the photographs.
The sight of the cult compound, barely remembered from my childhood, makes my stomach churn.
The church, the neat rows of white houses, the Sunday School where Rachel taught us. Each marked with a date on the back.
“I feared they would hold it against me when the boy ran away,” she continues, her voice distant.
My hands still; she must mean Cain. What a way to refer to her own son.
“But it was not my fault. It wasn’t. I did my best to raise him well, and piously.
I couldn’t take him into a church, of course, but I’d lock him in his room and tell him to say his prayers every Sunday.
” Her lips press together in a thin smile.
“And he listened, every time. I could tell because the cross would leave burns on his hands whenever he held it.”
My shoulders stiffen as I recall the scar on his right hand, the sign of the cross burnt forever into his skin. Oh, Cain, I think, and I’m grateful I’m not facing her, because I don’t think I can hide the anger making my hands tremble as I sift through photographs.
“He was so obedient,” she says. “So polite. I might have been fooled if I didn’t know what he was.
But others sensed it, too, you know? He never had any friends.
Things would happen around him. Accidents…
” She trails off. “It got worse when he was older. And I think he could tell, eventually. He could tell that I was frightened of him.”
You’re a fucking monster, I want to say, but I bite my tongue.
It helps that my attention is split between her rambling words and the photographs in my hands.
I pause at a shot of a younger Rachel, wearing a white dress with a crown of flowers on her head.
That sort of adornment was odd for the devotees of the cult.
We were expected to be plain and humble. Women especially.
“I wish I hadn’t had to raise him on my own,” Rachel says. “It would have been easier with those of the faith around me. But I understand. I understand why it had to happen. That we had to keep it secret, keep him secret.”
The next several photographs are all of Rachel in that dress and crown. Some feature her alone, and others show a crowd around her. They face the camera in solemn lines, faces hidden behind golden masks. Hands reaching for Rachel as she passes by.
Another photograph of the masked cultists binding her wrists while she lies on a stone altar. The knot of dread in my gut tightens. But when I look closer, I see that her expression isn’t fearful, but reverent.
I swallow a lump in my throat. Is this what she meant when she referred to the ritual? The photographs certainly have an air of something occult, something profane. I don’t want to see what happens next, but I have to know. I have to.
My fingers shake as I set the picture aside and look at the next one. And the next, and the next. The images show cultists surrounding the altar. One of them holds a book. Their mouths are open voids behind the holes of their masks, as if they are talking, or singing, or chanting.
The more I look, the more I swear I can hear the faintest whisper of something, like a distant drumbeat in my ear.
My eyes dart from the cultists’ masks to Rachel on the altar.
She is arched, contorted, her eyes white, her body a blur of motion.
Her expression might be terror, or it might be ecstasy.
In the next image, the cultists’ eyes are all turned in the same direction. A shadow falls over the now-limp woman on the altar. There is something misshapen about that shadow. It is too large, too bulky to be human, its head misshapen. When I squint, it looks like horns.
“I suppose it wouldn’t have mattered,” Rachel says. “Of course no amount of prayer could overcome that dark seed within him. But he is a necessary evil. That’s what Samuel has always said.”
Bile rises in the back of my throat. I fumble with the stack of photographs and drop them, spilling memories across the floor. Rachel cries out in protest, reaching out a trembling hand. I drop to my knees muttering apologies, scrambling to pick them up.
Seeing the back of the photographs, I realize how many of them are marked by the same date. I flip one, and my stomach drops. The night of the ritual.
My mind is already racing through math that I don’t want to do.
I want to recoil, to stop the train of thought, but it’s impossible to ignore.
The ritual took place nine months, to the day, before the day that the Children of the Red Sun took their own life under the preacher’s guidance. The same day that Cain was born.
The ritual was planned. To create him. To end the world.
Sick with dread, I shove myself to my feet and stumble back. Rachel is still staring at me with that mad hope, so reminiscent of her expression during the ritual that I want to vomit. I back toward the door, turn, and run.
“Tell him!” she cries after me, as I flee through the hallways. “Tell your father I kept the faith!”