Chapter Seven
SEVEN
SILVER, WAIST-HIGH FOG GLOWS against the moonlight as it creeps across the lawn, tendrils snaking, wrapping around ankles and thighs, grabbing on to the figures standing in the heat of a blazing fire, the wood of the crumbling structure crackling beneath its flames.
Without thinking, I step forward. The inferno’s flames are like forked tongues licking the sky, undulating, pulsating, throwing soot and debris as the wind blows. My skin itches with burning. The air reeks of sulfur, like the devil himself has opened up the gates of hell in Earnest.
In the distance where the smoke doesn’t touch, a set of five stars are incandescent against the inky black, connecting in a constellation like an upside down Y.
It’s familiar, but I can’t quite place it in the haze of my mind. Closing my eyes, I search for the answer just out of reach when the chanting begins.
Low and deep. A sorrowful, discordant sound that raises the hairs on my arms. It starts out soft, growing as it sweeps across the field, gnawing at my nerve endings until I’m nauseated and my hands are covering my ears in desperation.
I tread closer to the fire, closer to the bodies emitting this deep, dissonant sound.
They stand around the smoldering building in perfect intervals, a dozen furious, sweat-slicked women.
Their voices a roar against the swirling wind, their hands outstretched as though they would be intertwined if only they could reach a little farther.
On the other side of the clearing, a woman stands. Her gray coils pulled back with a black scarf. She wears mourning clothes: A black, long-sleeve dress that brushes against the dirt. Her face is lined with age, and her mouth is pursed in judgment.
The wood continues to wheeze and snap beneath the flames, and I startle as something scorching whizzes past my head.
“Hello? What’s going on?” My throat is raw and irritated from the smoke, and my voice drowns in the cries of the women.
I avoid looking at the elder across the clearing as I tap the girl in front of me, but she doesn’t turn her head.
I move to the next, pressure building in my chest. I’m too hot, but my skin is bone dry. “Please! What’s going on?!”
This one looks right through me. Her eyes are white, no iris or pupil to be found. Sweat rolls down her face, mixing with tears, dripping from her chin and gathering in the dip between her collarbones.
I take in her attire, similar to the old woman across the way. Long sleeves meet a structured blouse that tapers before widening into a full, ankle-length skirt. Her hair frizzes around her head from the dampness of her sweat.
It occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t be asking where I am, but when.
Bony fingers press harshly into my arm and drag me away from the chanting women. “Hey!” I yell over the commotion, wrestling against the elder woman’s otherworldly strength.
As we exit the circle crudely carved into the ground, a different sort of song breaks through the chanting.
This one is a bizarre melody. It fights against the repetition, creating an antiharmony so jarring, I don’t fight when the old woman shoves me behind her back.
I peek over her shoulder as she pushes us farther away until the scale of the fire is finally in full view.
Rising in the distance like a tidal wave, its many windows reflecting the flames back to us, the oldest buildings of Black Mountain Academy are propped up against the night sky.
My breath hitches in my throat as I realize where we’re standing.
What’s burning should be Lee Chapel, but that can’t be true. This building is much smaller in scale, though still at the top, drooping to one side, is a belfry, the bell red hot, the light emanating from it nearly too bright to look at.
Behind me, the clatter of metal and wood, and the shush of heavy fabric draws my attention.
When I turn around, I’m met with a gang of hooded men, their faces obscured by sharp black masks with feathers sprouting in points along the sides and long, curved beaks tipped in bullet silver.
In their hands are crosses held high in the crimson glow of the fire.
One voice rings louder than the rest, its deep tenor muffled by the contraption on his face. “Behold the evil poisoning the land of Earnest! Abominations made to feast upon, the hands of Satan made corporeal, sent to destroy all that is holy. We rebuke your wicked ways in the name of the Lord!”
Behind the men, darkness blooms. Darker than dark. An obsidian wall with arms and gnashing teeth. The sulfur smell intensifies, and a rotting hiss precedes them, curling the overgrown grass.
I gasp, cold blooming in my core, squeezing my insides in terror.
But the women don’t waver. Instead they chant louder, staring ahead as a crack begins to snake through the ground between them, worming its way beneath the building.
Some of the hooded figures falter, but those that don’t charge ahead, their crosses parallel to the ground as though they’re to be used as battering rams. The women turn in unison, their hands stretching in front of them, the chant still falling from their lips.
“Witches!” spits the leader of the hoods. “This magic is corrupt. You will no longer spoil Earnest with your unholy power!”
“Witches?” I ask the woman as I step to her side, but she doesn’t acknowledge me. Instead her eyes are trained on the women.
I follow her gaze and nearly fall to my knees.
Even stranger than the fact that the women’s eyes are all whites is that, as they form a line, their fingers finally intertwining, their toes lift from the ground as they levitate at the mouth of the blaze.
The man in front drops the cross and instead unsheathes a long knife from somewhere beneath his cloak.
Moon- and firelight glint off the blade.
The figures behind him turn their crosses around so that the bottom of the stipes, sharpened to a crude edge, stake the ground, freeing their hands for what inevitably comes next.
I can’t breathe. My fingers sink deep into my hair as I look between the two groups as again, my screams are swallowed by the chaos. But I can’t stop. I open my throat and finally fall, begging the old woman to do something, begging the men to retreat.
“Get up!” the woman hisses, once again yanking me by the arm. “You never kneel at the feet of men, girl!”
I am helpless as she pulls me to standing until we’re eye to eye.
“Who are you?” I ask. “What is this?”
“Never mind that, child,” the woman says, her bony hand coming to rest against the side of my face. Her left eye is a cloudy, milky blue, but her right is sharp like a blade and the color of liquid silver. The contrast against her deep brown skin is familiar in a way that aches.
I glance over her shoulder and have to choke down the vomit that surges up my throat. Rope, twisted into nooses, dangling from the fists of cloaked men.
“What—”
“Shush!” she says, gripping my jaw between her fingers and forcing my attention away from the gruesome scene.
Her good eye carves across my face, dissecting me piece by piece. “The time has finally come,” she whispers. I can only shake my head between her hands in confusion.
“I never did see your face,” she says cryptically. “I never did know how you was gonna turn up. I only knew to keep watch. I only knew how to sacrifice.”
My head is throbbing, my mind racing, but it’s no use—her words sound like gibberish, and all I want to do is turn my head. All I need to do is save these women somehow.
“We done with the sacrifices, girl. You hear me? We done! You not here to sacrifice, you here to make things right. You here to balance the scales. You gotta take. You gotta take it all back. They not gon’ give it to you.
You gotta take it! You hear me?!” She’s nearly shaking me now, my tears flinging this way and that, my head bobbing on my shoulders like a newborn.
“I don’t—I’m not—” I’m sobbing, confused. “I’m sorry!” I shout because I don’t know what else to say. “I don’t know, but I’m so sorry.”
She stops shaking me, frustration screwing up her face, her eyes alight in reds and oranges and searing, atomic white.
When all I can do is stand there and stare back at her, trembling and close to gagging on the putrid smell wafting from the scene before us, she finally rolls her eyes and grips my shoulders.
“You not gon’ get it coming from me, I see.
You not ready yet, you ain’t prepared. You not what we was hoping for.
” Disappointment clouds her face as she tsks.
“But you gon’ get it one way or another.
You gon’ heed our warnings.” Her lips twist into a cruel smile, and I gulp down the panic swarming inside me.
“I ain’t want it to come to this,” she says, mumbling a string of curses. “But we done waiting!”
I don’t have time to respond before her palms smack roughly against my shoulders and she sends me crashing straight through the ground.
The world tilts, and suddenly the sun is warming my eyelids.
I shield my face with my hand as I take in the old burgundy Victorian, and I’m heartened by the fresh coat of paint, the sturdy, level porch, and the windows gleaming in the light.
But the house stands in stark contrast to the rest of the world, which is cast in what appears to be some kind of necrotizing shadow.
Everything is in shades of gray. The coneflowers and irises, the bushes of elderberry, and the thicket of normally red buckeye along the bank of the creek, all wilted and dripping with decomposition.
The stream burbles and bubbles like a cartoonish vat of acid, and the smell is nearly enough to make my head go dizzy from holding my breath.
I scramble across the soured yard and stumble through the back door and into the kitchen.
I gulp the sweet-smelling air, stomach gnawing on itself when I spot the flour-dusted island and rows of freshly baked biscuits, tops gleaming with melted butter.