Ceremonies Read online

  The lilac bushes, too, had blossomed early – a month ago, in fact -though by tradition they should not have reached their fullness till today, May first, the Beltane: sacred, some believed, to Baal's teine, the ancient god's sacrificial fire. Legend said that, on this day, one who bathed in lilacs' dew would be granted beauty for a year.

  The legend held no charm for her. The time of her beauty was past, and she was past mourning it. There was no one on earth that she cared about, not even her only son, Sarr. The lilacs' time was past as well; soon they too would wither and turn brown.

  Stepping from the doorway, the air around her humming with cicadas and bees, she strolled morosely among the ordered rows of flowers. Their lives, though brief, had always been vastly more interesting to her than people's. The crocuses and snowdrops were long dead and the daffodils dying, but the peonies and baby's breath had just begun to bloom, and a few other species were now at the height of their season: the blue and purple columbines whose leaves, when grasped, brought courage to the fearful; the delicate pink gillyflowers, sprung from Mary's tears, whose petals could be used for divination; the lilies of the valley – born, it was said, from the blood a saint had spilled fighting dragons in the forest – whose cup-shaped blossoms, properly prepared, were an aid to failing memory.

  Not that she herself had need of memory aids, or courage, or divinatory powers. She forgot nothing, feared little, and foresaw far more than she cared to. The Lord, in His harsh wisdom, had singled her out from the rest. He had shown her shadows of the future, tormented her with visions of the world to come. He had seen to it that, despite what good befell her, she would never be happy for long.

  It had not always been this way. She had been born with certain 'gifts,' as the Brethren called them, a certain wayward talent for prediction or the lucky guess, for reading secret thoughts from people's faces; but such gifts were common to the women in her family. Others before her had known them.

  They were a small people, the Troets, given more to scholarship than farming, which set them apart from the rest of the community; yet in some ways their strength lay far deeper than the farmers'. It had always been, curiously, a female's strength, expressed not in the usual human terms of opposition to nature, or in futile attempts to master or control it, but in a kind of day-to-day alliance with its laws. Nature had, in turn, rewarded them; the Troet women – one or two, at least, each generation – had been blessed with certain powers of intuition, as if they were in touch, more directly even than the farmers, with aspects of some fundamental process: rainfall and impending winds, vegetation's cycle, the changing of the seasons and the moon. Mrs Poroth remembered her own maternal grandmother, a Buckhalter by name but a Troet by descent, who could read approaching weather in a cockcrow or a certain slant of light, and who'd speak familiarly of 'little signs' that others had ignored. It had been a gift beyond her ability to explain; when asked about it-as, when still a child, her granddaughter had asked – the old woman would say simply, with an indifferent shrug, that there were 'other ways of knowing.'

  Mrs Poroth herself, it was believed, had inherited some of these powers; as a little girl she'd begun to understand, in a primitive way, how to let the world speak to her through the smells and colors of flowers, the shapes of leaves and clouds. But there'd been nothing truly exceptional about her talents – until that summer morning of her thirteenth year when, on the day after her grandmother's funeral, drawn by some unaccountable impulse to climb the stairs to the old woman's attic, she had discovered the Pictures.

  They had been inside a folder tied with ribbon, crushed beneath a pile of dusty books in the darkest corner of the room. The renderings were crude, the sort of things a bright nine-year-old boy might have produced. They were drawn in luridly colored chalk on cheap rag paper, yellow and cracking around the edges and stiff with age. They looked at least half a century old.

  Her eyes had widened as she sifted through them; she'd felt the sudden pounding of her heart. Crude though they were, the images had stood out from the cracked and yellowed paper with terrifying clarity. There were twenty-one drawings in all, each on a separate sheet and each, in its own way, filling her with inexpressible horror. There was a white birdlike thing with blood upon its breast, dying; a pool of dark water, with the hint of something crouched beneath it; a pale yellow book, fat and somehow repellent; a low earthen mound of odd proportions, and a red satanic-looking sun, and a cold oppressive moon, and a round white shape against a black background that she first took for another heavenly body, a planet or a moon, until suddenly, with a shudder, she saw it for what it was, a great round lidless eye…

  Some of the Pictures were so queer she couldn't tell what they were meant to be. Like the slim black sticklike object; and the things that looked like dogs, only so badly drawn it was hard to be sure; and a pulpy thing that might be a coiled worm and might be smiling lips; and another figure, small, dark, and shapeless, with the half-formed look of dead things and decaying leaves, like a child's attempt to draw some creature he had heard about but never seen.

  And with each new image, impossible memories were stirring; even the strangest of the Pictures, the three concentric circles with the red slash down the middle, seemed somehow familiar, in ways almost painful to think about. And there were others even worse: a horrifying scene drawn entirely in white, and another entirely in black; and a hideous thing that may have been a rose, except it had what looked like teeth; and a tree with something in it, a thing that glared and beckoned.

  She knew that it was beckoning to her. The room was tipping forward; she was slipping, falling, the world spinning around her, drawing her toward that terrible face in the tree…

  Dizzy, she had somehow had the presence of mind to hide the evil things, to shove them back beneath a stack of old papers before stumbling wild-eyed and delirious down the stairs.

  When they found her minutes later, crumpled and unconscious on the second-floor landing, it was believed she'd had a fall. She was carried into what had been her grandmother's bedroom and laid on the dead woman's bed. There were some who felt uneasy about using the chamber of one so recently departed, and a younger brother wondered aloud if her fall hadn't perhaps been occasioned by a glimpse of the grandmother's ghost, stalking the attic overhead. But the Brethren were, above all, a practical people and not inclined to place much importance on such concerns. They knew they had nothing to fear from ghosts.

  She had lain all that day as if under a spell, barely breathing enough to stir a goose-down feather held beneath her nose. Her face had become as rigid as a mask; when they peeled a lid back, they found the eye turned up in her head so that Utile more than the white showed, as if she were gazing at the inside of her skull. Her family feared for her life and, having just buried one of their number, spent the hours in prayer, begging the Lord to content Himself with the pious old woman He had so recently taken to His bosom and to spare this unworthy child. But if He heard them, He made no sign.

  The trance had continued through the night and into the following morning, a hot, windless day that turned the old house into a furnace. Brethren gathered on the first floor to mop their brows and pray for the girl's soul, many quietly preparing themselves for a second funeral. A few even wondered if this wasn't perhaps a judgement on the whole Troet clan and its strange contrary ways.

  And so things had remained until evening of the second day, when suddenly the girl's eyes opened and she sat bolt upright, startling those assembled at the bedside with a scream that sounded like 'The burning!' She was quickly declared to be out of danger; her dramatic awakening seemed merely to have been the culmination of a nightmare, and her family was relieved to discover that, despite her cry, she appeared to have no fever.

  But the nightmare had been real, she'd been sure of it. She'd been flooded with visions, lying there, images of murder. Somewhere just outside Gilead a girl very like herself was about to die. There was light, and a tree, and an odd design with three concentric ring
s…

  Her confused ravings were not entirely dismissed – the Brethren took such warnings seriously, aware that the Lord occasionally allowed men glimpses of events to come- but it was difficult to make sense of what she said. A tree? There were thousands of trees not half a mile from the house. A girl? It could be anyone's sister or daughter. And as for the design she'd babbled of, what were they to make of it? They could hardly be expected to act upon a prophecy so vague.

  And in the end she had relented. Perhaps they were right, her family and the others; perhaps it had been a nightmare after all, brought on by her discovery of the Pictures – whose existence she'd been desperately anxious to keep secret.

  Two days later a group of hunters had come upon the partially burned body of a girl from a nearby village, suspended from a tree in the part of the woods they called McKinney's Neck.

  She had felt, in part, responsible for the death. A vision had been vouchsafed her, and she had failed to heed it. Never again would she allow this to happen.

  That had been in 1939. Since then, over the years, she had sifted the Pictures many times, though always without joy, studying them at night by her bedside. She no longer had to see them all; merely staring at a few of the now-familiar images, drawn at random from the pile, was enough. Invariably the dreams would come.

  She had never told a soul about the source of her knowledge. The community had no suspicion. The Brethren regarded her as a model of piety, and, after her first prophecy had been proved true, they accorded her a superstitious respect not untinged with fear, coming to her often for advice. She doubted they'd look kindly upon her use of the Pictures.

  She detested them herself; she knew what dreadful visions had inspired them. She knew the identity of the dark, formless creature, and the terrible things it could do. She'd learned what the circular design meant, and where it was to be used. And she knew – had always known – who had drawn them all. Even in those first dreams in her grandmother's house, she had seen in the Pictures the hand of her vanished ancestor, the boy Absolom Troet.

  Over the years she had come to suspect, if dimly, what the boy's instructions might have been. And she trembled at them. For beneath the dreams that the Pictures inspired loomed a great black certainty that haunted every waking hour, a vision of the future which, as a young girl, then a housewife, now a solitary widow, she felt powerless to alter or prevent.

  Though she knew she'd have to try. Surely the Lord expected nothing less.

  In recent years, like one who leaves unread a message of bad tidings, she had resorted to the Pictures less frequently – had avoided them, in fact, preferring to leave them tucked safely inside the great leather-bound Bible on the nightstand by her bed, as if to thereby make them holy. She had no need to open the Bible; its every word was as familiar to her as the images Absolom had drawn.

  'And now, Lord, what wait I for? My hope is in thee… '

  She frowned as she moved farther down the hill, troubled by what she saw: the scattered clumps of rosebushes, the late-blooming teas and early-blooming damasks and mosses that grew here and there above the stream. They reminded her of something.

  For just last night, aware that a visitor, an outsider, was due among them this May Day, and knowing with dread that, exactly as prophesied, a month with two full moons lay ahead, she had succumbed to curiosity and the demands of conscience. At bedtime she had opened the Bible, slipped out the Pictures, drawn forth at random the images of moon, rose, and serpent…

  The dream, she recalled now, had been set right here, in this garden, by that moss-rose halfway down the slope.

  Darkly it came back to her.

  She'd been walking here, just as she was now. Only it had been night, and hot, and moonlit. One leaf on the moss-rose bush had looked different from the others in the ghostly light: a single leaf half hidden by the night shadows of the damasks, but her sharp eyes had picked it out from several yards away. There seemed to be – there at the tip – an odd, unnatural whiteness…

  No, not just at the tip. She saw as she drew nearer that the entire leaf was edged in whiteness, the dark familiar greenness in retreat, as from a creeping frost or a cold invisible fire.

  She ran her fingers over its surface; she was sensitive to plants, they spoke to her in a hundred furtive ways, and surely this one had secrets to reveal…

  Her fingers, this time, told her nothing. Around her the air throbbed with the buzzing of unseen bees. Grasping the rose branch, she tugged lightly at the leaf. There was a sudden stinging pain, and with a cry she yanked back her hand. Protruding from the fleshy area just below her thumb was a pale green thorn snapped off jaggedly at the base. She pulled it out; it was curved, wicked-looking, nearly an inch long. How had she failed to see it in the moonlight?

  The buzzing had grown louder, more insistent. As she brought her wounded hand to her lips, the blood flowing salty and warm, something occurred at the end of the branch just inches from her face.

  A rosebud moved.

  Her eyes widened. Why hadn't she noticed it before? The bud was fatter than the others, the skin moist and somehow pulpy-looking. It was clinging to the thin branch like a lump of rotting meat.

  Warily she reached for it. It shifted at her touch. The air shrilled with an angry insect sound that clamored like a warning in her ears, and there beneath the radiance of the moon, in the heat of that rose-perfumed night, she felt a chill.

  Torn from the branch, the bud seemed heavy in her hand. Her fingers probed the dark-veined leafy covering. One by one the leaves peeled back; like a piece of hollow fruit the skin split and fell away. Inside lay a pale, ropy thing curled like a length of intestine. As the moonlight fell on it, it stirred.

  She saw now what it was: a plump white worm, thick as a baby's finger – a plump white worm that, as she watched, uncurled, raised its unwrinkled head, and glared at her. A plump white worm with a human face.

  Grimacing, she dropped it to the ground. She was sure she heard the creature scream as she crushed it beneath her shoe: scream words at her as from a human mouth, human lungs, a human throat, words in some dark ancient tongue she'd never heard spoken aloud, but whose meaning, upon waking, she'd felt sure she understood.

  And now, just this afternoon, she had seen the visitor, all plump and pink and innocent, arriving with her son. She had recognized something in his innocent face. The dream had not lied. The Pictures were real. For the first time in her life, she felt too tired to pray.

  Absolom, the Old One, still lived: she'd known it all along, all her blighted life. She'd always known that one day he would make his move, assemble the performers – the man, the woman, the Dhol -and allow the process to begin. She had known that it would start the first of May and end the first of August, in a month with two full moons.

  But she'd always believed she had at least a decade left to her. She'd believed she would have more time to prepare. She hadn't realized it would come so soon. This year. This May.

  This summer.

  His journey takes him south, where rows of skyscrapers reflect the westering sun and cast giant shadows up and down the avenue. An idle weekend crowd fills the sidewalks, strolling past the ranks of street vendors and spilling from the shops to join the mass that merges and splits and merges again into a living stream.

  Unnoticed, the Old One walks among them.

  A half-naked boy limps toward him, pale head swollen like overripe fruit, clutching a thumb-stained envelope. A blind trumpeter blares against the traffic from the doorway of an abandoned building. Someone stands hunched over a pay phone, mouth working furiously. On the corner a haggard woman waves a blackboard scribbled with names and exhorts the planet to save itself; humanity, she cries, has been judged and found wanting.

  He knows that she is right. That judgement is his as well. Turning his back on the woman, he's confronted by his reflection in a store window: the short, plump figure swinging an umbrella, the blue serge suit gone baggy at the knees, the wide cherubic face b
eneath its halo of fine white hair.

  It is the reflection of a little old man.

  Once he had something in common with the figures crowding past him on the sidewalk; once, more than a century ago, he was one of them, part of the loathsome race that swarms over this planet. Now only the semblance remains, the organs, bones, and flesh. He has been washed clean of humanity; he feels no trace of kinship for these odious doomed beings, only a cold and unremitting hatred. As he passes down the avenue they part before him like stalks of corn.

  Stoplights change from red to green and the crowd surges forward. A bus groans, lumbering away from the curb. Brakes screech as a taxi sounds its horn. Dark feline shapes crouch beneath a parked car, then dart into an alley. From the next block echo the cries of children and, from another part of the city, the wail of sirens. As the Old One turns westward once more, the sun is sinking toward the distant Jersey hills, toward the factories and the dumps and the oil refineries. Suddenly the land is touched with red and the refineries glow as if ignited, hills turning to flame. The river shines with fire.

  The Old One blinks his mild eyes and smiles. Great events are imminent, and nothing that he looks upon will ever be the same. The crowds, the traffic, the hateful little faces of the children- soon, after the Voolas, they will trouble him no more.

  But first there are a few more preparations to be made. There is not much time left, and he will never get another chance: five thousand years must pass before the signs again are right. He will have to act quickly.

  He has already selected the man: some insignificant little academic with no family and no prospects. There are hundreds just like him in the city – all young, all hopeful, all doomed – but this one has been born on the necessary day, and (though the young fool doesn't know it yet) his interests lie in just the right direction. At this very moment he'll be out there on the farm, no doubt busily convincing himself that he likes it. He appears to be highly suggestible. He will do.