Read Online Ancient Eyes by David Niall Wilson - Free Book Online Page B

get the message, unless she went down to Greene's Store and paid to use his phone. If she'd done that, the old buzzard would have hovered over her shoulder and listened in on every word.
    "Things are different up there.   If you drive up to Friendly, it's pretty rustic, but if you take the fork past Greene's, you hit a long stretch of nothing, and shortly after that you'd be hard pressed to prove to yourself you weren't in another universe."
    "But," Katrina frowned, trying to picture it, "how do they live? What do they do?"
    "The same things folks on that mountain have done since the Spaniards first came to California and people started to settle. Some of them farm; there are grapes on the side of the mountain. Others raise goats and livestock, pigs, chickens—some do sewing, hunt and fish. You'd be surprised what you can get by on once you get yourself out away from the cities and the rules of modern society.   They get an occasional sheriff up there, and now and then a Highway Patrol car braves the potholes in the road, but for the most part the people on that mountain might as well not exist to the world down here. I suppose that will change one day."
    He stared off into the shadows for a moment, thinking.   His fingers continued to work over the surface of the coin, tracing the patterns again and again. Then he snapped back to the moment.
    "Then again," he said, "maybe not. There are things about that mountain that defy description. There are stories I have never told anyone because when I tell them to myself, they sound ridiculous and surreal. I have memories that I could be convinced were nothing but delusions, or dreams. At least, you could have convinced me a few days ago."
    Katrina stared at him, waiting for more. He saw the confusion in her eyes and closed his own, trying to settle the memories, and the roiling mass of questions that had surfaced over the past two days, into something he could tell her that would make sense.
    "There were two churches on the mountain when I was a boy," he said at last.   "One was my father's.   It was the highest thing on the mountain that I ever saw, except one. There were peaks that reached further, but I never climbed them, and I don't believe anyone I knew ever did either.   The church was like a boundary, cutting us off on the upper reaches.   The other church was lower, the furthest thing down toward the back road out of that part of the hills. I came out past it when I left."
    Above my father's church there was a place he used to go.   It was a small stone cottage, so old that no one remembers who built it—what kind of people they were, or even if we descended from them. It was just there, had always been there. The church was the same. We kept it up, put in a stone walkway and built some trellises around the graveyard behind it, but none of us knew how long it stood there—not even my father.   I asked him, but he only knew the history back as far as it had been recorded in writing.
    "That was more than 150 years, and he believed from the words recorded in those early times that the church was old when they were written. We will probably never know, and I don't think it's important.   The last time I saw that church was his funeral."
    "Tell me," Kat said.   She'd caught the hesitation in his voice, and he bit back the sharp reply that threatened. He didn't want to tell her.   He didn't want to think about that place, or that day.
    "It was a very long time ago," he began slowly, "but I remember it as if it happened yesterday."
     
    Abraham had not thought of that old church, or of his father, in longer than he'd been willing to admit to himself, let alone to another. His father's funeral was a memory of darkness and mourning. He remembered sitting between his mother and his Uncle Keith on the bench in the church. They'd brought in the preacher from Friendly, California, Reverend Forbes; a skinny, stick of a man with wavy hair and wild eyes. He'd glared at them