Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

Dancy picks up the gas can, and there's a moment when she's afraid that it might be too heavy now, that the weight of the duffel bag and the full can together might be too much for her to manage. But then she shifts the duffel to one side, ignoring the pain as the thick canvas strap cuts into her right shoulder, and the can doesn't seem so heavy after all. She splashes a stream of gasoline that leads from the pumps, across the highway and then down the road for another hundred yards, before she stops and sets down the almost empty can.

This is what I do, she thinks, taking one of the matches and the rough strip of cardboard from her pocket. Just like our cabin, just like that old church in Bainbridge, this is what I do next.

She strikes the match and drops it onto the blacktop, and the gasoline catches fire immediately, a yellow-orange beast, undaunted by the summer rain, blooming to life to race hungrily back the way she's come. Dancy gets off the highway as quickly as she can and crouches low in a shallow, bramble- and trash-filled ditch at the side of the road. She squeezes her eyes shut and covers her ears, trying not to think about the thing in the iron cage, or the naked woman it pretended to be, or the old man who would have fed her to the monster, trying not to think of anything but the angel and all the promises it's made.

That there will someday be an end to this, the horrors and the blood, the doubt and pain, the cleansing fires and the killing.

That she is strong, and one day soon she will be in Paradise with her grandmother and grandfather and her mother, and even though they will know all the terrible things she's had to do for the angel, they'll still love her, anyway.

And then she feels the sudden rush of air pushed out before the blast, and Dancy makes herself as small as she can, curling fetal into the grass and prickling blackberries, and the ancient, unfeeling earth, indifferent to the affairs of men and monsters, gods and angels, trembles beneath her.

Only a few miles south and west of the sleeping city of electric lights and sensible paved streets, where a crooked red-clay road ends finally before nettle thickets and impassable cypress swamps leading away through the night to the twisting, marshy banks of the Flint River, sits the ruined husk of Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church. Erected sometime late in 1889 by two freed slaves from Alabama, forsaken now by any Christian congregation for more than two decades, it has become another sort of sanctuary. Four straight white walls, no longer precisely white nor standing precisely straight, rise from a crumbling foundation of Ocala Limestone to brace the sagging grey roof, most of its tar-paper shingles lost over the years to summer gales and autumn storms. In places, the roof has collapsed entirely, open wounds to expose decaying pine struts and ridge beams, to let in the rain and falling leaves and the birds and squirrels that have built their nests in the rafters. Here and there, the holes go straight through the attic floor, and on nights when the moon is bright, clean white shafts fall on the old pews and rotting hymnals. But this night there is no moon. This night there are only low black clouds and heat lightning, a persistent, distant rumble somewhere to the north of Dry Creek Road, and Dancy Flammarion stands alone on the cinderblock steps leading up to the wide front doors of the church.

There are two dozen or more symbols drawn on the weathered doors in what looks like colored chalk and charcoal. She recognizes some of them, the one's that the angel has warned her about or that Dancy learned from her grandmother before she died-an Egyptian Eye of Horus and something that looks like a letter H but she knows is really the rune Hagal, a pentagram, an open, watchful eye drawn inside a triangle, a circle with a fish at its center. They're all there for the same reason, to keep her out, to keep whatever's hiding inside safe, as if she were the monster.

As if she's the one the angel wants dead.

Dancy's dreamed of this place many times, a hundred nightmares spent on this old church brooding alone at the nub end of its narrow, muddy road, the steeple that lists a bit to one side, threatening to topple over, the tiny graveyard almost lost to blackberry briars and buckeye, ferns and polk weed. At least a hundred times, a hundred dream-sweat nights, she's walked the long path to this place, and sometimes the doors have no protective symbols to ward her off, but are standing open, waiting for her, inviting her to enter. Sometimes, the stained-glass windows and the empty window frames where all the glass has been broken out are filled with flickering orange light, like dozens of candles or maybe a bonfire someone's built inside the church. Tonight, the windows are dark, even darker than the summer sky.

She sets her heavy duffel bag down on the cinderblocks, which were painted green a very long time ago. Now, though, most of the green paint has flaked away or is hidden beneath a thick crust of moss and lichens. Dancy opens the canvas bag, and it only takes her a moment to find what she's looking for, the big carving knife she's carried all the way from Florida and the burned-out cabin on Eleanore Road. She ties the duffel bag closed again and looks up at the sky just as a silent flash of lightning illuminates the clouds and silhouettes the craggy limbs of the trees pressing in close around the churchyard.

"Please," she says, "if there's another way," and from the other side of the door there are sounds like small claws against the dry wood and a woman's nervous laughter, and Dancy squeezes her eyes shut.

"I don't have to do this," she says, trying to ignore the noises coming from the church. "There must be somebody else besides me, somebody stronger or older or more-"

Something slams itself hard against the inside of the door, and Dancy screams as the carving knife slips from her sweaty fingers-

– and the church doors splinter and burst open, unleashing a gout of freezing, oily blackness that flows down the cinderblock steps towards her. Darkness that's not merely the absence of light, but a darkness so absolute that only in passing has it even dared to imagine the possibility of light, darkness become a living force possessed of intellect and hate, memory and appetite. It surges greedily around Dancy's legs, stickier than roofing pitch, tighter than steel jaws about her calves, and in a moment more it has begun to drag her towards the open doorway-

– and Dancy catches the knife in the last second before it strikes the cinderblock steps, and she shakes off the deception, nothing but some unguarded scrap of childhood fear turned against her. She glances over her left shoulder, wondering if the angel's hiding itself somewhere in the trees, if it's watching just in case she needs help.

You never needed anyone's help before, her dead mother whispers. That night at the creek, the night it dragged me down to the deep place, or that day in the Wood, you didn't need anyone's help with the first two.

"With those first two, I had the shotgun," Dancy tells her, which is the truth, and she wishes that she'd thought to take her grandfather's Winchester out of the cabin in Shrove Wood before she burned it to the ground.

It wasn't the shotgun killed them, her mother whispers, her voice like someone who's trying to drown and talk at the same time.

"It helped, I reckon," Dancy says. "It was better than having nothing but this old knife. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not even very sharp anymore."

This time her mother doesn't bother to answer, so Dancy knows that she's alone again, no murdered ghosts and no vengeful angels, and so it's time; she takes a deep breath and stares at the doors to the old church, the peeling white paint and the symbols that have been put there to keep her out. Then Dancy uses the tip of the knife to cut something invisible into the air, something like the sign of the cross, only there are more lines and angles to it. She does it exactly the way the angel said to, her own secret magic to undo all the monsters' hexes, and then the albino girl climbs the last two steps and reaches for one of the rusted iron door handles. She isn't surprised that the door isn't locked.