Unease sifts through my drowsiness, but I can’t figure out why.
“Walk, Cathy,” Dad says under his breath. “We’re not dragging you the whole way. Just…walk.”
My weary brain tells me I shouldn’t upset him, so I try to walk. I force my sluggish feet to move, despite the gnawing sense that something is wrong, so very, very wrong.
“You gave her too much, Nellie,” Dad mutters.
“Like you’re the expert,” she snaps. “Who stepped in tomanage this mess?Me. Like I did with Mom and Dad. Like I always do.”
The venom in their voices helps to clear my mind even more. I lift my head and take in my surroundings. Great, dark trees with hunched shoulders. Grass studded with headstones. Up ahead, brick columns rear out of the earth.
Old Sheldon Church.
I haven’t been here since last Easter. It looked different then, gilded by beams of translucent sunshine glancing through spring-green leaves. Now it’s jutting bones, the skeleton of a sanctuary twice burned and still standing. Black trees surround it, lifting heavy, naked arms to the chalkboard sky. Mist rises from the ground, birthed by the dramatic drops in temperature so common in the Lowcountry during October.
This isn’t right. We shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous. Gods and monsters and death…
I want to thrash, to fight, to run, because despite the haze in my head, I can practically taste the threat in the air. But I don’t have full control over my body. I can barely walk, and although my thoughts are clarifying, I can’t seem to push those thoughts out of my mouth. I can’t protest or struggle. So I stumble ahead, buoyed by Dad and Aunt Nellie, watching ethereal wisps of white fog curl from the desolate ground. The mist moves with unnatural purpose, surging and receding like the quickening exhale of some titanic, eldritch thing.
Figures drift through the fog, slow and black clad. Faces I recognize dimly through the gloom and the sleepiness drowning my brain. Some of them have lanterns—actual lanterns with candles in them. I suppose that’s more atmospheric for a midnight service such as this.
We’re here to consecrate the ground, that much is clear. Whatever ritual they claim to have discovered, it’s happening tonight. What Idon’t understand is why they couldn’t leave me home to sleep while they performed it. I’m so tired.
So tired because…I haul the truth out of my drowsy memories…because Aunt Nellie has been drugging me.
A chill traces over my skin, revulsion at her touch. Just moments ago, Dad said, “You gave her too much,” so heknows. He went along with this scheme of hers to keep me drugged and docile, to control and “cure” the banshee inside me.
Fuck. Fuck me, and fuck them.
The certainty traces through me like a sickening bolt of lightning—that this gathering is somehow aboutme. That I’ve been tricked, that I’ve been gullible, that I should have known better, shouldn’t have let them lull me into a dazed existence, shouldn’t have trusted my own blood, not even for one second, because when did they ever give me a reason to think they truly cared about me? I wanted their love too much. And that was my mistake.
I try to speak, to scream, but the thoughts get distorted on the way to my mouth and they come out as garbled nonsense.
“Hush now,” admonishes Aunt Nellie.
Tension stretches between the members of the congregation—taut lines of fear running from person to person as they file slowly from their cars, across the grass, into the columned shadow of the church.
Several of the deacons carry crystal decanters, which I assume are filled with blessed water. Is it really that different from other kinds of water? Does it truly have some kind of power? It must, or the god wouldn’t have stayed dormant this long.
No, that’s not what’s important here. Focus, Cathy.Focus.
I struggle against the drugged haze in my brain. What are they doing with me? What thehellcould they possibly be planning? Abaptism, an exorcism…a sacrifice? Aunt Nellie used that word.
No…no, it’s not possible, even for them.
But I can’t be naive about this, not with all that’s been happening. Not with the way they’ve been treating me for years.
Maybe that’s why I believed their gentleness and kindness after that horrible episode at the church—I was so hungry for acceptance. I thought, I hoped, that maybe Dad and Aunt Nellie finallysawme, understood me. But it was the worst kind of lie.
I have to get away. I have tomakemy body comply. Sheer fucking force of will…Come on, Cathy, get it together…
I go limp and drag my feet, but Dad hauls me up roughly and curses under his breath. Maybe I shouldn’t antagonize him, at least until I know what’s going on. A few more minutes might give me better control over my limbs. So I walk again, complying for the moment.
I spot one of the trees that has always fascinated me—a crooked, swollen trunk with an eye-shaped split in its side. Within that opening are neat lines of bricks, a bit of wall built within the tree itself. Those bricks cover holes where the limbs of the God Beneath began to emerge on the night of my birth. My dad and the deacons sealed the holes with clay, iron, and salt, and they soaked those trees with blessed water until the god settled again.
We’re entering the church now, passing through a brick archway. Dad and Aunt Nellie walk me toward the front, where Edgar Linton and a few of the deacons are standing, illuminated by the glow of several lanterns hung from the arches behind them. Ian Holcum, the guest speaker from this morning, is here, too, his shaggy brown hair casting dramatic shadows onto his hollow cheeks, around his dark eyes. He’s wearing a long black coat.
I shouldn’t be surprised he’s here—after all, he’s Edgar’sprecious “expert” on myth and lore. Still, it’s odd. Usually the church is resistant to outsiders, especially when it comes to our private rituals.
