The Hollow Ones(73)

When the floating powder reached Mother, it formed suddenly into a misty smoke. The smoke rose in a column around Mother, rising as high as the balcony above. Mother’s form remained essentially the same, but like a fine filter the smoke revealed an alter-figure, a manifestation that was purely spiritual, at least three times larger—taller and broader—than Mother.

She wore a flowing nightgown of diaphanous mist. The spirit inhabiting Mother—or so Solomon intuited, staring raptly at this enormous feminine figure dwarfing Blackwood and himself—waved her arms as though floating in a viscous fluid, her raven-black hair rippling behind her head like a dark aura. Her facial features twitched as though she were in distress or pain.

Hugo…

Her voice originated not from the giant apparition but from the air around Solomon’s head. Mother was black-skinned, a woman in her forties. The haunting projection was white-skinned, a woman in her thirties or perhaps even younger: Torment obscured her face.

Blackwood paused when he heard his name. He looked up into the vast face of anguish-plagued beauty, and for moments appeared grief-stricken, stuck.

Solomon, entranced by the sight of this behemoth phantasm, reacted almost too late. Pastor Eppert—compelled by the thing that entranced him—had risen from the floor, lunging at Blackwood’s back. Solomon grasped the larger man around the chest, tackling him into the pews across the aisle.

Blackwood resumed his ministrations, the incantations and more powdery smoke. Solomon, his knee on the back of the pastor, saw the swirling ashes briefly assume a form like that of a large crow before the widening eyes of the suffering spirit.

The crow of ashes sailed into the smoke-consumed apparition…and through it, blasting into a million glowing cinders, the giant spirit collapsing and dissipating like a vanishing curtain.

Mother fainted, released, falling to the floor.

Blackwood lowered his outstretched arms like the conductor at the conclusion of a mad symphony.

Solomon felt the pastor move beneath him. He let the man up cautiously, eager to look into his eyes.

Pastor Eppert looked bewildered, exactly as a man waking from a dark trance should.

“What is happening?” he said. “Who are you?”

Blackwood gathered the elements of his kit and walked to the woman in the choir robe, now stirring on the floor. He helped her to roll over and sit up.

She retched, dazed, shivering as though from a fever. Her pupils had returned, eyes reddened around the rims, lids lowered as though in pain. Black ash fell from her silver hair.

Solomon pulled the pastor out into the aisle. He saw his wife sitting at the back and staggered over to her. “Mother!” But as he reached her, an angry roar exploded behind them. Solomon ducked and turned, expecting a monster or some other hideous entity.

It was the flames ripping into the altar from behind, the blaze bursting through the wall in a cough of heat and ash, blackening and blistering the thin wall, licking at the suspended cross.

Bodies ran into the church entrance, the black townsfolk, yelling, “Fire! Fire!”

Sheriff Ingalls, his deputies, and SAIC Macklin followed, looking up at the blazing altar, finding Solomon and Blackwood with Pastor Eppert and his wife in their arms, dragging them out.

“What happened?” exclaimed Macklin.

Solomon could not answer. How could he put words to it?

Blackwood said, “Make sure there is no one else inside!”

The lawmen responded to that, racing toward the sacristy as the church filled with searing heat.

Blackwood and another man carried Mother out, while Solomon got Pastor Eppert’s arm over his shoulder and walked him into the street.

They laid them down on the sidewalk a safe distance away, where other folk tended to them. Solomon looked up at the black smoke billowing out of the rear of the church. He found Blackwood and put his hand on the British man’s chest, pushing him away from everyone, needing answers.

“What was that?” he said.

Blackwood said, “A slave demon. Possessed the woman. Exploited her and the pained souls who built this church.”

“Why?”

Blackwood looked at him as though the answer was plain. “Because it could. Drawn by the legacy of suffering of this place. This is a vindictive spirit. Sorcery of death, injury, and revenge.”

Solomon was going crazy. Either that or Blackwood already was. “The slave demon is a white woman?”

“That is the face it showed me. Evil comes to you in a familiar form.”

Solomon looked at the whites who had moved across the street, drawn by the fire. He turned back to Blackwood.

“I need to know what this is. You burned down a church. We’re going to have a riot here.”

“That is what it wanted,” said Blackwood. “To cause an uprising that would consume the town.”

“You’re damn right,” said Solomon. “You want blood in the streets, just set fire to a black church.”

Blackwood said, “The corrupt site had to be cleansed. Abdiel would have returned—”

“I don’t give a hot damn about that, what am I gonna do right here, right now?”

Solomon stepped back from Blackwood. He looked at the street again. The black congregants held each other, most of the women weeping anew, the men becoming angry. The whites that had crossed the street stood near them, looking concerned, almost reverently so. The destruction of a church—even one that wasn’t theirs—was an affront that affected them deeply.