The slim figure stood between them and the fire, silhouetted like an hourglass. As his sight cleared, he realized that she was dressed in a long, full skirt and tight bodice – the clothes of another time. She had turned at the call, and he had a brief impression of wide eyes and fair, flying hair, lifted and tossed in the hot wind of the fire.
He found time, struggling to his feet, to wonder how she had dragged a log of that size up here. Then the smell of burned hair and crackled skin hit his face like a blow, and he remembered. Greg Edgars was not at home tonight. Not knowing whether blood or fire was the necessary element, she had chosen both.
He pushed past Brianna, focused only on the tall, slim girl before him, and the image of a face that mirrored his own. She saw him coming, turned and ran like the wind for the cleft stone at the end of the circle. She had a knapsack of rough canvas, slung over one shoulder; he heard her grunt as it swung heavily and struck her in the side.
She paused for an instant, hand outstretched to the rock, and looked back. He could have sworn that her eyes rested on him, met his own and held them, beyond the barrier of the fire’s blaze. He opened his mouth in a wordless shout. She whirled then, light as a dancing spark, and vanished in the cleft of the rock.
The fire, the body, the night itself, disappeared abruptly in a shriek of blinding noise. Roger found himself facedown in the grass, clutching at the earth in frantic search of a familiar sensation to which to anchor his sanity. The search was vain; none of his senses seemed to function – even the touch of the ground was insubstantial, amorphous as though he lay on quicksand, not granite.
Blinded by whiteness, deafened by the scream of rending stone, he groped, flailing wildly, out of touch with his own extremities, conscious only of an immense pull and the need to resist it.
There was no sense of time passing; it felt as though he had been struggling in emptiness forever, when he at last became aware of something outside himself. Hands that gripped his arms with desperate strength, and the smothering softness of breasts thrust against his face.
Hearing began gradually to return, and with it the sound of a voice calling his name. Calling him names, in fact, panting between phrases.
“You idiot! You… jerk! Wake up, Roger, you… ass!” Her voice was muffled, but the sense of it reached him clearly. With a superhuman effort, he reached up and got hold of her wrists. He rolled, feeling ponderous as the start of an avalanche, and found himself blinking stupidly at the tear-streaked face of Brianna Randall, eyes dark as caves in the dying light of the fire.
The smell of petrol and roasting flesh was overwhelming. He turned aside and gagged, retching heavily into the damp grass. He was too occupied even to be grateful that his sense of smell had returned.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and groped unsteadily for Brianna’s arm. She was huddled into herself, shaking.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God. I didn’t think I could stop you. You were crawling straight to it. Oh, God.”
She didn’t resist as he pulled her to him, but neither did she respond to him. She merely went on shaking, the tears running from wide, empty eyes, repeating “Oh, God,” at intervals, like a broken record.
“Hush,” he said, patting her. “It will be all right. Hush.” The spinning sensation in his head was easing, though he still felt as though he had been split into several pieces and scattered violently among the points of the compass.
There was a faint, crackling pop from the darkening object on the ground, but beyond that and Brianna’s mechanical ejaculations, the stillness of the night was returning. He put his hands to his ears, as though to still the echoes of the killing noise.
“You heard it, too?” he asked. Brianna went on crying, but nodded her head, jerky as a puppet.
“Did your-” he began, still laboriously assembling his thoughts piecemeal, then snapped upright as one came to him full-formed.
“Your mother!” he exclaimed, gripping Brianna hard by both arms. “Claire! Where is she?”
Brianna’s mouth dropped open in shock, and she scrambled to her feet, wildly scanning the confines of the empty circle, where the man-high stones loomed stark, half-seen in the shadows of the dying fire.
“Mother!” she screamed. “Mother, where are you?”
“It’s all right,” Roger said, trying to sound authoritatively reassuring. “She’ll be all right now.”
In truth, he had no idea whether Claire Randall would ever be all right. She was alive, at least, and that was all he could vouch for.
They had found her, senseless in the grass near the edge of the circle, white as the rising moon above, with nothing but the slow, dark seep of blood from her abraded palms to testify that her heart still beat. Of the hellish journey down the path to the car, her dead weight slung across his shoulder, bumping awkwardly as stones rolled under his feet and twigs snatched at his clothing, he preferred to remember nothing.
The trip down the cursed hill had exhausted him; it was Brianna, the bones of her face stark with concentration, who had driven them back to the manse, hands clamped to the wheel like vises. Slumped in the seat beside her, Roger had seen in the rearview mirror the last faint glow of the hilltop behind them, where a small, luminous cloud floated like a puff of cannon smoke, mute evidence of battle past.
Brianna hovered now over the sofa where her mother lay, motionless as a tomb figure on a sarcophagus. With a shudder, Roger had avoided the hearth where the banked fire lay sleeping, and had instead pulled up the small electric fire with which the Reverend had warmed his feet on winter nights. Its bars glowed orange and hot, and it made a loud, friendly whirring noise that covered the silence in the study.
Roger sat on a low stool beside the sofa, feeling limp and starchless. With the last remnants of resolve, he reached toward the telephone table, his hand hovering a few inches above the instrument.
“Should we-” He had to stop to clear his throat. “Should we… call a doctor? The police?”
“No.” Brianna’s voice was intent, almost absentminded, as she bent over the still figure on the couch. “She’s coming around.”
The domed eyelids stirred, tightened briefly in the returning memory of pain, then relaxed and opened. Her eyes were clear and soft as honey. They drifted to and fro, skimmed over Brianna, standing tall and stiff at his side, and fixed on Roger’s face.
Claire’s lips were bloodless as the rest of her face; it took more than one try to get the words out, in a hoarse whisper.
“Did she… go back?”
Her fingers were twisted in the fabric of her skirt, and he saw the faint, dark smear of blood they left behind. His own hands clutched instinctively on his knees, palms tingling. She had held on, too, then, grappling among the grass and gravel for any small hold against the engulfment of the past. He closed his eyes against the memory of that pulling rupture, nodding.
“Yes,” he said. “She went.”
The clear eyes went at once to her daughter’s face, brows above them arched as though in question. But it was Brianna who asked.
“It was true, then?” she asked hesitantly. “Everything was true?”
Roger felt the small shudder that ran through the girl’s body, and without thinking about it, reached up to take her hand. He winced involuntarily as she squeezed it, and suddenly in memory heard one of the Reverend’s texts: “Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed.” And those who must see, in order to believe? The effects of belief wrought by seeing trembled fearful at his side, terrified at what else must now be believed.
Even as the girl tightened, bracing herself to meet a truth she had already seen, the lines of Claire’s tensed body on the sofa relaxed. The pale lips curved in the shadow of a smile, and a look of profound peace smoothed the strained white face, and settled glowing in the golden eyes.