I woke with a strangled gasp.
Something was clotting my throat, choking me. It tasted like dirt. My helpless, fraught fingers encircled the column of my neck. My pulse thrummed like hummingbird wings.
Not this again.
I coughed out the obstruction. It was too dark to see what it was, but as I clutched blindly at the substance on my sheets, clumps of damp soil molded to my grasp. I smelled a cool, earthy aroma, and felt tangling roots sift through my fingers like a freshly turned grave.
I climbed out of bed and stumbled toward my lamp.
There was no dirt on my sheets. But a gritty residue remained on my tongue.
Sometimes, I dreamed that a bloodstain bloomed across my ceiling. Drops would splash onto my forehead, rhythmic and incessant. Other times, my bones strained in their sockets, like some force was trying to dislocate them.
All my life, I’d had these dreams. They’d gotten more frequent and more vivid since I’d become a teenager. Grandma Kerry had somehow always known about them, even when my parents had no idea. Usually, she was already awake, waiting for me. Sometimes, she was standing over my bed. I used to tell myself that she must have heard me gasping and thrashing in my sleep, but in hindsight, I had to admit it seemed like strange, inexplicable intuition.
After she was gone, I started trying to rationalize the dreams. You pushed yourself too hard in the heat today, I thought now. You’re having some kind of retroactive heat stroke that’s making you hallucinate.
But the excuse didn’t work this time. I needed Grandma Kerry.
I grabbed my pillow and raced my fear down the hall.
I didn’t feel safe again until I had shut myself in her old room and leaped onto the creaky bed. I bumped my head on the regal, imposing headboard as I nestled under the covers, but I didn’t care. I felt safe.
Here, nothing could hurt me.
Morning came. I knew that the episode last night had been nothing more than a dream. That’s all they ever were. But none of the dreams had ever felt so real.
Rubbing my eyes, I kicked my bare feet over the side of the bed and planted them on the rug. This was a guest room now, but we hadn’t changed much except for the bedding, and we’d packed away the outdated lace doilies and dorky kid pictures of my dad. Everything else was familiar, including the vanity tray on the dresser that held Grandma Kerry’s old jewelry and a creased picture of Grandpa Willie—items that had helped anchor her to a sense of self when she had started to drift. She came to live with us after accidentally burning down the house where she’d lived with Grandpa Willie for decades by leaving a pot unattended on the stove.
At the vanity tray, I brushed her perfume bottle and plucked her understated twisted vine wedding band from a porcelain dish.
“Nat, are you up, baby?” Mom called from down the hall. “It’s graduation day!”
Startled, I dropped the ring. It bounced with a bright ding across the wood planks and onto the rug, settling somewhere under the bed.
“I’m up!” I called back. I glanced at the clock and realized I had to be gussied up and on the courthouse lawn in less than an hour. I dropped to all fours, saw a glint of gold, and flattened myself to retrieve it. With the ring safely in my grasp, I wriggled back out from under the bed, rucking up the border of the rug—which revealed a deep trench carved into the wood floor.
Sitting back on my heels, I traced my finger along the rough path.
A lump formed in my throat. Curiosity overpowered any sense of urgency. Frowning, I stood up, replaced the ring, and shoved the bed frame aside. When I flung away the rug, I gasped.
The symbol of the cult spanned the space under the bed, frenzied and furious. Unlike the neat lines on the stones, it seemed to have been carved in haste, maybe even in a state of mania.
Like pressing a tender bruise, I let a horrible memory play through my thoughts. Grandma Kerry’s mental decline had been inconsistent, lurching, riddled with bouts of confusion and embarrassment at her confusion, which caused her to sink into silence. But there had been a few episodes of paranoia and something her doctor had called “catastrophic reactions.” One in particular had given my parents no choice but to hire a live-in caregiver.
On that day, Grandma Kerry woke up wild-eyed, the gray hair that was still tinged with youthful blond mussed from sleep—or sleeplessness. She had charged into the kitchen and seized my wrists in her surprisingly strong grip while I was preparing to leave for school. Blood streamed down her arm from her elbow, dripping onto her robin’s egg blue nightgown.
“I can see them,” she said. “I can smell them. They’re growing stronger. It will happen again.”
Dad had sat her down at the table in the breakfast nook and tried to calm her, pressing a cloth to her wound. But she erupted like a madwoman, screaming that he would never understand and how lucky he was for that. My mom whipped out her phone to call an ambulance as she ushered me away from the scene.
Now I stared at a smear of dark brown on the wood planks in her bedroom, right at the heart of the mark. Blood.
Having witnessed the determination in her stormy eyes and the sinew behind her grip, I wondered if she had spent that sleepless night secretly carving this mark and covering it up.
Dad couldn’t find out about this. No one could. I would protect him from the pain for as long as possible, and I would protect what was left of my grandmother’s dignity.
But haunting questions needled me: Was there any chance that the paranoia, the warning, and the mark weren’t just the workings of a broken mind?
Was there any chance that Grandma Kerry had known more about her own grandmother than she’d let on?
And most crucially, was there any chance that twelve more people would die?
EXCERPT:
PAGANS OF THE PINES: THE UNTOLD STORY OF MALACHI RIVERS
Lillian Pickard, 1968
In 1905 Simeon Rivers, a sawmill worker, founded Calvary Baptist Church in San Solano, Texas. His mission was to subvert the liberalism of other protestant churches in the area. As a staunch Fundamentalist Baptist, Simeon was far from popular, but he was a hardworking, resourceful man with a measure of charisma. He purchased an acre of land for twenty-five dollars and built a church.
At the time of its establishment, Simeon and his wife Ruth had a four-year-old son named Malachi. Ruth was pregnant with their second child. They lived in a small parish house beside the church. But after Simeon had preached only a handful of services, a violent storm blew through town and demolished both structures. Ruth and Malachi were struck by debris. Ruth and her unborn child survived. The boy did not.
Grieving their beloved son and their church challenged Ruth and Simeon in different ways. Simeon, determined to honor God’s calling upon his life, raised funds to rebuild. Ruth clung to the promise of her unborn child, certain that God would give her another son upon whom she could bestow the name Malachi in honor of her firstborn.
To her dismay, the second child was a girl. Ruth detached from her daughter but had been calling her Malachi for months. She had no heart to change the name. Simeon attempted to convince his wife to choose any other, but the power of Ruth’s maternal grief swayed him. He wanted her to heal.
But Ruth did not heal. Since Malachi’s brother had been so young when he died, Ruth mounted him on a pedestal. He was an icon of unattainable innocence and perfection who had not been afforded the chance to develop his own distinguishable traits and flaws. Every time the younger Malachi misbehaved, as children do, she was called sinful. She could never measure up to her God-fearing brother.