Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(112)

The room was quite large, as I’ve said. Wherever the ceiling was, it was high enough overhead that I couldn’t dream of touching it; and the floor, smooth as marble—it might have even been marble, black marble as stark as onyx—was marked with designs drawn in salt. These designs were concentric circles, but they were not evenly spaced. It took me a moment to realize that I was looking at the solar system. Each of these rings represented the orbit of a neighboring celestial body, and each of these planets was marked with a tidy little cairn that was lit and burning with incense. I smelled sage and sandalwood, and something sharper (but I couldn’t decide what it was). The raw, wet, rotting smell upstairs was wholly absent here, for this place had been purified. The herbs alone wouldn’t have done it, but something did.

It was clean, do you understand? Purified. Holy. The holiest, if the reverend’s assessment could be believed. (And he believed it.) The claptrap, altered, added-on-to mansion upstairs was not a church. This was a church.

The salt lines swooped across the floors in their lovely arches, untouched by footprints or scuffs, scrapes, or other disturbances. Their sweet-smelling, improvised planets did not line up, so much as they provided a series of stops on the way to the altar at the middle—where the sun ought to be, but a vast white stone sepulcher awaited instead. It was round, yes. Spherical, even—except that the top was flattened, cut off so cleanly it might have been sliced with a razor.

I wanted to stare at it, but I was nearly blinded by the thing after traveling through so much darkness to arrive there. So instead I shifted my gaze along those planets, those cairns that stood for them . . . and I realized that they must be stations. Like the stations of the cross, in any good Catholic establishment. That’s precisely the purpose they served. They were a map to salvation.

I wondered where the light was coming from. The chamber was illuminated, yes, but the sheer unsullied whiteness of that altar could not have been its source. Or could it? On second (or third, or however many) thought, I can’t rule out anything as impossible.

Not after what I saw there. Not after what came next.

I walked those stations, tiny altar to tiny altar, on the way to the great one at the center. I was careful to keep from touching the salt; it felt like sacrilege to consider it, but the toe of my shoe found it tempting, at times, and I was tracking dirt across the pristine place anyway. I told myself that this might be the place where all the dirty things came to be cleaned—literally and symbolically both. But I’ve told myself a lot of things over the years, and that one makes as little sense as any of them.

So I walked the stations.

At the edge, I passed what stood for Neptune, and past it a few yards I touched the edge of Uranus and felt the simmering coals; I paid my respects to Saturn, breathing the ashes of its rings; I visited the great giant Jupiter, where I smelled amber and myrrh; I stopped by Mars and smelled only fire, only the chemical warp of sand melting to glass; and then our own home, with a whiff of ocean air and fresh dirt.

I was very close then. Yet still I could hardly bring myself to look up and see the altar, the great Sol at the middle, where all roads led—or all lines encircled. You see? It’s awful, how insufficient this vocabulary is. It’s embarrassing, how I found myself dazed and moving closer, closer, to something that could not possibly be good.

Here was Venus, cool and smelling of morning mist when the air is nearly frozen. Even though the incense smoldered, when I hovered my hands close to its edge, I felt only a chill.

There was a noise. There had always been a noise, hadn’t there? I remembered it from upstairs, from inside the false church and underneath it. I think I’d grown so accustomed to it that I simply hadn’t heard it anymore. Unless . . . could the chamber have cleaned the noise away, too? No, that couldn’t be right. The smell was gone, the dirt and mildew of the dug-out places were gone, but the sound . . . the sound remained.

There, closer to the center, it was less like a garbled noise. I almost thought it might be a song, but it was no music I’d ever heard; and I cannot say that it was lovely, or grating, or anything an ordinary mortal might use to describe a set of notes. But it was compelling. So compelling, it might have been what drew me forward to that altar, or maybe it was the light that, yes, came from that weird white stone after all.

The vivid white glow emanated from the top, from the flat portion. It projected upward but not very far. It made me think of a lantern behind a sheet of waxed paper, diffuse and present, but not far-reaching.

Mercury. Small and red were the coals, smelling of char and hickory. The cairn was so warm that I couldn’t bear to stand beside it long, even to gaze down at the patterns made by the tumbling ashes, rolling over one another as if stirred by a poker.

Only a few feet more. Then three steps, each one’s corner sharp as an axe head.

The altar was almost the size of the automobile I’d arrived in. It was white, so very white. So pure that, if it was marble, I’ve never seen its equal—devoid of flecks, veins, or any speck of color. I don’t think it was marble. I don’t know what it was, but I do not believe it was of this world, and I will stand by that statement regardless of how it sounds.

I wanted to touch it, and I wanted to run away from it screaming.

I did neither of those things. I stood beside it, and I gazed down into it—for the top was not flat, per se. It was no shelf, no platform. It was a window to something else, and in it, I saw my own reflection. And someone else.