Ancient Eyes Read Free

showed the mark of termites. These would have to be removed carefully. Silas wasn't worried about the vermin. Men, insects, and rodents were equally simple to contain and control, once you knew their secrets. He stepped up to the door, pushed it wide, and entered.   He was greeted by the flapping of startled wings. Something dislodged from the ceiling and fell in a trickle of dust to land behind the pulpit. Silas swept his gaze up and down the walls and took in the signature the years had etched across them. The church had never been magnificent. It came closer, in fact, to magnificence in its decay than it had ever aspired to in its glory. Once brilliant fluorescent lamps had illuminated the altar, while the muted golden light of wall sconces stretched back past the pews. Rich curtains of deep purple had run floor to ceiling behind the pulpit, covering the baptismal pool and the rest from sight until it was needed, and providing the perfect backdrop to the spot lit stage of the Lord.
    He turned slowly and looked up above the frame of the door through which he'd entered. There was a small alcove just over the center, and in that he could just make out two eyes, glaring at him from the shadow.   Hair roped out in strands from the sides of a narrow, elongated face.   Leaves were woven in and out of those strands, carved of the wood of some ancient tree in a place and time so far removed from the mountain, and that church, that their history was lost.
    The carved head should have stood out, stark and wrong against the flat, even boards of the church, but it did not. Instead, the roping, vine hair stretched to the sides and into the shadows. The glare of the eyes was intense, and if you returned that stare, even for a moment, you got the impression that, rather than the head being added to the church, the church had grown out from the wood of the strands, that it all centered back on that one small square shelf and the rest of it was nothing but the trappings of her court.
    Silas tore his gaze away, and smiled.   As he moved, just for an instant, the dark shadow of antlers passed across the wooden floor and up the back of the rear pew.   He caught the motion from the corner of his eye and his smile widened perceptibly.
    Turning from the woman above the door, Silas felt as if she embraced him, as if the church itself embraced him, extending out in waves from her twining, ropy root hair.   The walls wound around to the tattered remnant of the curtains, and beyond them he saw the concrete and tile of the pool. Plants grew there, green plants with roots and brown limbs, not the solid wood of the woman's hair, but the earth, probing inward and trying to reclaim what had been stolen. The stone and the wood, the tile and the water—was there still water? Was it possible?   Was it blessed, and if so, by whom?
    Silas strode down the center aisle, ignoring the piles of moldy hymnals and the scattered papers, crushing the folding paper fans with stained-glass images and fair-haired Anglo-Saxon Christs , blue-eyed and smiling beneficently as they walked on water and healed the lame. As the children gathered at their feet. As demons fled into the swine.
    Something sloshed in the water, slid over the side of the pool, and was gone in a sinuous roll across the wooden floor and out the rear door of the building. Silas ignored it. As he neared the altar the dark energy that had filled him so completely since the bonfire in the woods awoke. His senses expanded. He was aware of the scent of the water in the rotted pool, felt the pulse of the creatures that rested within, and around him. He felt that other; her eyes bored through the back of his skull and pressed him onward. He felt more acutely the embrace of the arms that extended from beneath that carved head through the medium of walls and windows, floor and patched roof. The building was alive, and the deeper he entered into that life, the more a part of it he became, and the less a part