Augusta stood, wide-eyed and shivering and feeling the sweat that had misted at her hairline. What just happened? Why?
Staring at the ruin around her, she flinched at the sound of glass crunching underfoot as she eased the gun from her pocket. The safety pin hadn't budged – a good thing. But, a holster; she would definitely have to find a holster, either that or make one. The next time she hit the ground the gun might errantly take off her kneecap.
She realized she didn't know how many bullets were left. Maybe there were none left and the gun wouldn't take off her kneecap after all if she fell down again. And maybe there were none left and something nasty would be undeterred by the shovel and shamble up to take a bite out of her.
The clip popped out, and she inspected it and saw four bullets left, which meant there was room for three more. As easily, the clip popped back in, and she very carefully double-checked the safety and slid it back into her pocket. Must find holster – the gun was supposed to help her feel more secure, not more nervous.
She was surprised the windows hadn't shattered and let the fog from outside pour in, she thought, and inspected her knee and was pleased to see the shattered glass hadn't torn a hole in her jeans. Then she looked at the table in the center of the room, with the mangled brass light fixture and its snapped chain lying like an exotic spider, dead with its legs curled and dried.
The four books had landed like the cardinal directions of a compass, one at each head of the table. The nearest was heavy in her hands as she picked it up to inspect a passage inside highlighted with neon-blue marker.
There is no religion that has remained unchanged from the moment it was founded. This one is no exception. When the religion fell into the hands of immigrants, it was deeply influenced by their own original Christian beliefs. For example, the traditional representations of these primal gods may be given the names and descriptions of Christian angels. Thus shared characteristics begin to appear. (There is also one rare example of the chief deity, 'Creator of Paradise' or 'Lord of Serpents and Reeds', being dubbed with a demon's name. Of course, this was not done by believers but by their opponents.)
She glanced at the top of the page to read the title in tiny print beside every page number.
Silent Hill's Ancient Gods: A Study of their Etymology and Evolution
A mouthful of a title if there ever was one, she thought and began to flip through the book, which smelled peppery and old. Nothing was highlighted on any page before the first entry marked in blue. Throughout the rest of the book, though, were marked lines and entire paragraphs, and August read them all.
And she learned.
The religion later coalesced under the moniker of the Order began in the region of the world later coalesced under the moniker of the Middle East, at roughly the same time the first true pharaoh ascended the throne. It worshiped an obscure goddess of water who demanded sacrifice and suffering as tribute to prove her followers worthy of her release of the life-giving rains and cooling mists.
The goddess was called Uwedolisdi-Ageya, which translated very loosely as the "Sad Woman."
Augusta stopped and was suddenly very aware of the pressing silence of the library, and felt as though someone was watching. And speak of the devil and up she jumps, her mind contributed cheerfully. She shot a look at the windows and saw nothing but the mist outside. There was no one behind her and nothing looking in at the door with its large glass panel.
It felt as though something was stirring. She had felt it before, as though there was always something crawling and chewing its path just beneath Silent Hill's diseased skin. It could pop through at any moment. She realized she had felt it since she had awoken on the wrong side of the grate in Wiltse Hill Tunnel. It was the essence of everything that was wrong in this place now, she thought.
Please keep me safe. A quick prayer, and she read on.
The Sad Woman drank blood and dined on flesh –
...the statement of which is likely merely a metaphor describing an almost "vampiric" creature that fed on pain and suffering...
–and would not accept the sacrifice of an animal, as only her followers' self-sacrifice would prove true devotion. The religion was led by women and every seven years the high priestess was required to produce a child...
...and that child was designated the "Ehisdv-Uhutsi" which literally translates as the "Captive of Pain"...
...and that child was proclaimed the holiest of holies and favorite of the goddess, who gave life with her gifts of water and mist.
The Captive of Pain was then tortured –
–very carefully so as to remain alive through every abuse for the next seven years–
– for the next seven years of his or her life. At the end of the seven years the child was sacrificed, hung by the ankles over the "Ivory Tabernacle," which was built from the bones of all the children that had come before, and disemboweled with a copper dagger.
And at the end of this "Red Ceremony" the next Captive of Pain was presented to the people, and the cycle began again.
It would appear the Sad Woman found the suffering of young children especially delectable, and only children between infancy and seven years of age were considered pure enough. For seven years of constant torture the goddess would partake of their pain and in essence use them up before discarding them in a final "blaze of glory," so to speak.
The high priestess kept a harem of the healthiest and most beautiful men of the people, with which she produced the Captives of Pain.
...and during the years of imprisonment of the Captive of Pain, the men of the harem were required to have intercourse with the Captive daily, regardless of the child's age or whether the child was male or female. If at any time during the captivity a girl-child conceived, it was considered a portent that the goddess herself was preparing to enter the world, and that the end of the world was drawing near. Ancient texts record that conception was a fairly common occurrence, though amazingly, never once did a conception result in a birth.
Augusta's hands had gone ice-cold. Weeping Mary fed upon pain and suffering and once upon a time she ruled a people who willingly provided her with a child to devour every seven years. How had something this horrible – how had something so very, very wrong – survived the ages? How had it survived long enough to cross oceans and then ford rivers she herself had crossed on planes and buses and in cars? How had it survived long enough to build a home for itself in cities she had visited and a town she had lived in?
How had something so awful and exotic and ancient survived long enough to spread its poison to places that were familiar and modern?
With the sustaining blessing of abundant water assured by their sacrifices, the followers of Uwedolisdi-Ageya were a stable farming people in a region of nomads and as such began to build a reputation as merchants, as numerous nomadic tribes passed through and by their lands, trading for the goods of the "Uwedolisdites" and later trading for the goods of other tribes which had already come and passed on.
It was this prosperity that later drew the attacks of other established peoples in the region now known as Iraq, and the Uwedolisdites were at last driven from their ancestral homeland.
And over the next thousand years, near-constant attacks drove them further and further west until an entire people had been reduced to a tiny cult living as roaming gypsies in the Europe of the Roman Empire.
The Uwedolisdites – who appear in ancient Roman writings as the "Gravae" or "Those who Inflict Pain" – had shrunk in number to the point they could no longer sustain their goddess' incessant need for her food that was the suffering of children. And thus it was deemed necessary to prey upon the young of any community they passed through or settled in.
She read on. Here and there, it seemed entire pages had been marked in blue. Augusta learned the Gravae persisted through and after the downfall of the Romans and wandered the continent and crossed the English Channel to Britain as outcasts until finally claiming as their own the abandoned Welsh village of Pentref Diflanedig, which had been completely depopulated by the Black Plague.
And at last, with a home to call its own again, the Gravae, now known as the Order – the Welsh word for which Augusta couldn't being to pronounce – flourished for almost three and a half centuries. Their reputation grew and terrified the villages and towns of the surrounding countryside, where it became common practice to never allow children to venture out after dark. Word spread that the Order worshiped a demon, Samael, who was responsible for their prosperity and who would protect what was his, and even the English monarchy was wary of launching an attempt to destroy them.
Until the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745 provided a convenient excuse for their exile from the British Isles. They were accused of disloyalty to King George II, and banished to Canada.
They arrived in Nova Scotia in 1746, only to be purged with the French Acadians to Louisiana in 1765.
And the Order remained in New Orleans, practicing its magic and appeasing the Sad Woman until January of 1815, when the Battle of New Orleans, last in the War of 1812, occurred and the magicians of the city finally rose up to drive them out, cursing them for the city's unusually large share of misfortune, including its attempted capture by the British in the battle.
...No one honestly blamed the members of the Order for bringing the Battle of New Orleans to their city, as the town was a vital port and it was only to be expected the British and American forces would clash there. However, it had always seemed that misfortune swirled around the Order like a dark cloud and it couldn't be denied that in the parts of town they were known to frequent, people disappeared more often and people died more often and people got sick much more often than elsewhere in the region – even in a city prone to epidemics and fevers, slave uprisings, and crime of all kinds. Also, it could not be argued that the great fire of 1788, which destroyed 865 buildings, and that of 1794, which destroyed 212 structures, had both begun in the quarter where the followers of the Order lived...
And so the exodus began northward, denied a home everywhere until their eventual arrival in a soggy new county where misfits and outcasts went to be left alone by the rest of the world. The Order made itself at home, partook of the White Claudia flowers that had figured so heavily in the ceremonies of the Toluca Indians, reduced to that single withered old man in his cabin, and built themselves a village where before there had only been scattered farms and ragged huts, and the impenetrable Paleville Estate.
And Silent Hill was born. Then came the circuit-rider preachers, then came the tourists, then came the merchants... And all the while the Sad Woman feasted on pain and suffering while the town grew and grew. There was always plenty to feed upon. She made sure of it herself. Perhaps, when an abusive husband had meant only to berate his wife with words, the Sad Woman whispered in his ear to encourage him to use his fists instead. And perhaps, when an awkward and gawky freshman at Silent Hill High School walked past a group of mean and muscled football players in the cafeteria, she suggested every so gently that instead of snickering to themselves, they ought to make a vicious comment just loudly enough for others to hear. Or better yet, shoot out a foot and send the freshman sprawling and humiliated and splattered with what was to have been his lunch, to the floor. You'll get extra points if you can make him break his glasses or chip a tooth.
Instead of scowl, scream. Instead of scream, slap. Instead of slap, hit. Instead of hit, kill. It would make the Sad Woman happy if you would.
It would make Weeping Mary grin. She might even take off her sunglasses and cry tears of joy.
There was more. Augusta set the book on the table because she didn't want to hold it any more. It felt as though the cover had sprouted a cobble of pus-filled blisters under her fingers. She reached down to turn the pages and learned that over the time, through constant exposure to the pervasive Christianity of Europe and the New World, the Order had adapted its theology. Rather than suffering for the nourishment of the goddess, the suffering's intent had become a way to awaken a sleeping god in hopes she would see the plight of the earth, take pity, and bring about Paradise.
Augusta knew better. Weeping Mary was very much awake, and enjoyed agony for no other reason than that it fed her and she found it amusing.
More still. Even the last chapters of the book were marked with blue. It seemed the misfortunes of New Orleans had followed the Order even to their new home in Illinois. Even though mosquitoes were never to be found where White Claudia grew, fevers and epidemics still struck now and again. Not nearly as often as elsewhere, but still they struck. Cholera, yellow fever, scarlet fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, polio, and a host of obscure birth defects. The largest outbreak was of yellow fever in 1880, which was severe enough to warrant the founding of Brookhaven Hospital in South Vale, which had later been converted into a mental hospital that served all of Toluca County. But, then came scarlet fever in 1883, which supposedly carried off the last handful of followers of the Order...
...and their strange, cruel god and all her angels and subordinates.
It did no such thing. Weeping Mary/the Sad Woman/Samael was alive and well and feeding. She didn't need a congregation in the town where she had built her nest.
Augusta moved on to the next book. It too had fallen open to a page with a passage highlighted in blue. She stopped, looking down at the open pages and holding her hands out as if to ward off the book should it suddenly leap up snapping at her. An illustration, a drawing, was circled in blue and she had seen that drawing before.
A circle with triangles inside and unreadable letters of an alphabet no one used anymore.
She had seen it aboard the Little Baroness, in one of the ever-changing paintings in the dining saloon, and for a moment she had also watched it burn itself onto the door of the oven in the ship's kitchen.
She read the marked paragraph.
This magic square, with strong protective and dispelling properties, is called the 'Virun VII crest' or the 'Seal of Metatron'. It will bring results regardless of whether the target is good or evil; its strength, therefore, places a very high burden on the caster. As it is also difficult to control, it is not usually used. This is why it bears the name 'Metatron' after the angel Metatron (or Metratron) also known as the Agent of God.
The book was called Laws of Other Worlds and when Augusta picked it up and flipped through it, she saw that nothing else in the book had been marked in blue, so she laid it down on the table again.
The Seal of Metatron. The difficult-to-use and difficult-to-control crest of the most powerful of the archangels. What did that mean? She already knew Weeping Mary was a demon, perhaps even the "Samael" mentioned in the other book, and that the Blue Lady was an angel. Metatron? A being that powerful?
Did Metatron wear blue roses in her hair? Had she held her hand over Augusta's mouth as a demon called Samael walked past, dragging a famous actress to her death? Was Kitty in Metatron's care?
Augusta tore out the page with the seal drawn on it and circled in blue, folded it carefully, and slipped it into the pocket not occupied by a gun that should have been in a holster. It seemed like a good idea to have it along, she thought.
No, it seemed like an extraordinarily good idea, she realized, and moved on to the third book.
A Million Truths: The Story of Religion in America
Most of a page was marked.
One characteristic, mentioned only in rare documents and dying out in the modern age, is that of the ritual sacrifice. One sect which placed an especially high premium on the sacrifice of self was known as the Order, whose American presence can be traced to New Orleans circa 1765 and later to the small town of Silent Hill, Illinois starting in 1815 and ending in 1883, when the last of this dwindling faith's members died in an outbreak of scarlet fever.
One particular passage from this faith's scriptures graphically illustrates the lengths to which the Order's members were willing to go to atone for grievous sins of individuals as well as of the people as a whole.
"Offering prayers, pierce a man's chest with a copper stake. Drench the altar in the blood which spouts red from the heart, to praise and to show loyalty unto God."
In another sacrificial rite mentioned in the same book, the victim is burned alive. This was a more dignified ceremony in which prisoners and sinners were not allowed to participate. Only the clergy could be sacrificed in a ritual meant to purge the sins of an entire people fallen out of favor with God. Similar to the burning at the stake, understandably no comparable rite can be found in any of the alternative religions practiced nearby. While some may speculate it may have some connection with the main deity being a sun god, a more detailed look into this faith's beliefs reveal that originally the primary god was a deity of water.
Even though this religion extols redemption, it brings to mind a dark and cultish history. Though the Order was very heavily influenced by its exposure to Christianity and Judaism over the years, it obviously failed to completely rise above its bloody roots.
No kidding.
The fourth book lay open to what looked like a timeline, beneath the title A Record of Crime and Punishment in Toluca County, 1890-1900. Beside the title of the book was the title of the section – Tables of Violent Crimes by Township.
This book had rocketed out from a shelf beneath a window, and glancing toward its empty spot in the row of books still packed in place there, she saw a volume for every decade. Each book was very large, as though there had been an unsettling number of crimes to record each decade.
Of course there had been. Weeping Mary had seen to that, especially in Silent Hill.
January 1, 1890 – Shooting with death resultant, Stevenson Lane, Wrightwood
January 1, 1890 – Shooting with death resultant, Gacy Street, East Silent Hill
January 1, 1890 – Shooting with death resultant, Weaver Street, South Park
Drunks with guns on New Year's Day.
January 3, 1890 – Stabbing with death not resultant, Carroll Street, South Vale
January 7, 1890 – Poisoning with death resultant, St. Germain Avenue, North Silent Hill
January 19, 1890 – Shooting with death not resultant, Crowley Street, North Silent Hill
January 27, 1890 – Beating with death not resultant, Nathan Avenue, South Vale
January 28, 1890 – Beating with death not resultant, Neely Street, South Vale
January 31, 1890 – Beating with death resultant, Neely Steet, South Vale
Three deadly shootings, and one fatal poisoning and beating each, plus a non-fatal stabbing, a non-fatal shooting, and two non-fatal beating – in one month. In a town that, at the time, had probably been home to no more than five or six thousand people.
And God only knew how many beaten wives and children there had been during that time, because those things simply weren't talked about then, not in polite company.
No one died in February, March, or April, but there were beatings, an "assault on a female,"which almost certainly meant rape, and shootings.
May featured an "assault with a hatchet" resultant in death on Dodd Lane in Wrightwood, and June brought an unusually large number of assaults, while a rash of "assault on a female" entries pocked July, August, and September.
Every month of 1890 brought violence and misery, Augusta saw, as did every month of 1891, 1892, 1893, 1894...
The crime rate of Silent Hill was astronomical, and Augusta knew that if she thumbed through the book for 1900-1910, or 1910-20, or 1980-1990, she would find the same records. In fact, there would probably be even more to record in the newer volumes because at some point it had become all the rage to bring the police into the matters of child abuse and wife beating.
Augusta remembered – Toluca County had long borne the stigma of the worst rates of child abuse and spousal abuse in Illinois. Worse than Cook County, home to Chicago. Worse than St. Clair County, home to East St. Louis, among the most notorious slums in the country. Worse than any number of depressed Illinois counties home to depressed cities and towns where depressed people reeled with the loss of thousands of industrial jobs. Every year the county maintained its dubious status, the Toluca Tribune launched a hand-wringing expose always crowned with editorials begging abused wives, and husbands, to seek help and informing children that, no, it was not okay for daddy to hit you or for mommy to stub her cigarettes out on your shoulder.
Oddly, it wasn't that all of Toluca County was beating its husbands with hammers and molesting its children in unusually high numbers. Only Silent Hill Township, the westernmost parts of Pleasant River Township, and the easternmost of Brahms – the sections of those townships which bordered Silent Hill.
Augusta didn't want to check the statistics for Brahms, Pleasant River, Ashfield or South Ashfield townships, but knew that if she did, she would find crime rates that were likely half that of Silent Hill, or even less.
How had it escaped notice? It hadn't, she supposed. However Silent Hill had always been the wildest town in Toluca, and a little more crime was only to be expected there. When Prohibition had closed all the bars in Brahms and forced the fancy restaurants in Ashfield to serve iced tea, booze could be bought in the saloons and fine dining rooms of Silent Hill as easily as before. No one cared.
When the mobsters of Chicago had vacationed in Toluca County (when they weren't partaking of the healing waters of Hot Springs, Arkansas that is), and eschewed the resorts of Ashfield, South Ashfield, Brahms, and Pleasant River for the Lake View Hotel or that palace in East Silent Hill, the Hotel Iroquois, no one thought it odd.
When the governments of Ashfield and South Ashfield decided to drive prostitution out of their towns in the 1950's, and the prostitutes simply packed up, moved to Silent Hill, spread their legs and kept satisfying customers as if nothing had ever happened, no one was unduly upset – it was more convenient for the tourists who liked that sort of thing anyway. The charms of the rest of the county were typically more readily enjoyed by a higher class of people.
Know thine enemy. Augusta knew her now.
She looked up with a startled huff of air as she suddenly heard pages flipping. The book, Laws of Other Worlds, she saw, as she walked to it and stared down at it.
When the pages stilled, the same bright blue ink she had seen in every one of the books began to bleed through the paper, marking nearly everything printed on page 394.
In areas suspected of being home to unusually high concentrations of "otherworldly" energies or a particularly powerful supernatural being, it is not at all unusual to find that supernatural events take place with high frequency or regularity.
Take the case of the small town of Silent Hill, surrounded on three sides by Paleville National Park in the high hills of central Illinois. The town is located in Toluca County, named for a now- vanished tribe of Native Americans who recognized the site where the city now stands as an area of extraordinary spiritual energy. In fact, the town takes its name from this recognition, in that the area was supposedly so spiritually powerful that the spirits of the area themselves were forever silent with reverential awe.
The city of Silent Hill, while a thriving resort and center for commerce, nevertheless records a very high number of fascinating seemingly-supernatural phenomena. One such incident is that of the Little Baroness, an excursion boat carrying fourteen tourists and crew that sailed into a foggy November day in 1918 and simply vanished. No trace was ever found of the ship or its passengers, and newspapers of the day could only conclude that "it most likely sunk for some reason."
No, it hadn't sunk for some reason, Augusta thought. An event so evil had occurred on board that the ship had been wrenched from reality and thus sailed endlessly into Weeping Mary's little fiefdom of hell.
An even stranger event occurred in 1939 when in the month of December, nineteen babies were born in Silent Hill with a horrific birth defect known as "harlequin fetus," whose medical name is ichthyosis fetalis, and which typically presents only in one out of every several hundred thousand births. There are no external environmental causes for ichthyosis fetalis. Harlequin babies are born with their skin replaced by a hard shell of keratin, the same substance that makes up fingernails and hair, and take their name from the look of their faces. The mouth is grotesquely deformed, as the inflexible keratin pulls it into a parody of a harlequin clown's grin. Harlequin babies typically live no more than a few months, if that, though one man whose wife had given birth to one of the harlequin babies murdered the child, then his wife, and then committed suicide himself while in custody for the crimes at the Silent Hill jail.
Augusta couldn't help herself. She turned away from the book on the table and kicked scattered books out of her path as she made her way to the shelf under the window where A Record of Crime and Punishment in Toluca County – 1890-1900 had burst out of a row of books just like it, one for every decade. She pulled the volume for the years 1930 through 1940, opened it, and flipped through it until she found the tables for each township.
There it was:
December 23, 1939 – Stabbing with death resultant, St. Germain Avenue, North Silent Hill December 23, 1939 – Stabbing with death resultant, St. Germain Avenue, North Silent Hill December 24, 1939 – Suicide of male inmate at Silent Hill Detention Center/Silent Hill Police Department, Crichton Street, Central Silent Hill
Interesting how by the 1930's suicides were being included in tables of violent crimes, she thought, but then again it was a record of crimes and punishments. The murders were the crimes, and maybe the suicide had been the punishment.
She closed the book and tossed it to the floor. There didn't seem to be any point in putting it back in place. Then she turned to look at the books on the table with its twisted and broken brass centerpiece. She had accomplished her goal in coming to the library; she knew all about Weeping Mary and the evil people who had brought her here with their worship. She knew what Weeping Mary had done to the town. She had something – the crest of an angel, who she suspected dressed in blue – that might just have power enough to help her escape from the hell that now stood in the place of the town she had once loved. Maybe it would even have power enough to help her take her daughter home.
If I can just take my child home, God, if I can just take her home... If you'll just give me this second chance, I promise I'll never want for another thing as long as I live.
But how would she do it? Out there – hell, for all she knew in here, upstairs – lurked Weeping Mary and Joseph. Weeping Mary wanted to torture her to feed on her. Joseph wanted to torture her probably just to have something to pass the time.
God, what if they really were just upstairs? She shivered at the thought.
Where should she go now? When she had first realized she was going to Silent Hill, she had thought she was going to march into the principal's office at Nathaniel Hawthorne Elementary School where the Mother's Day card had been sent, and demand to know just what in hell was going on. There was no need to go there. Kitty hadn't even sent the card at all, much less sent it from there.
There was the brownstone on St. Germain Avenue she had shared with Joseph, but what would be there? Joseph seemed to have built himself a new, and far more opulent, home in Summerland Cemetery.
There were any number of restaurants and shops that had been among her favorites, but nothing seemed particularly special about any of them. There was no reason to go exploring them for their own sake, and the same was true of all the places she had loved while living here. Nothing had pointed her in the direction of the Silent Hill Wetlands Gardens, or the Public Art Gallery, Lakeside Amusement Park, or the Silent Hill Town Center mall.
Something suddenly seemed different about the books on the table. She stepped closer for a better look and saw that something red was soaking the paper in blotches that met one another as the paper grew saturated and began to sweat red beads.
Blood.
The pages flattened under liquid weight, and the drops met in trickles, which grew into streams. All four books were bleeding. It welled up between the pages and ran through the valley where they met, puddling on the table before dripping onto the floor.
On the last day she had worked at the Asheville visitors center, she had been enjoying milk and cookies on her lunch break and had spilled her milk, which had run across the table and dripped onto the floor, and the dripping had sounded exactly like the blood now dripping down from this table.
The dripping grew into a sound like rain. The books in the shelves under the windows and lined up in ranks in the bookcases behind shattered glass doors were bleeding now, and in addition to blood, some fluid that smelled vaguely fishy and terribly organic was now trickling down from every shelf. She had no idea what it could be.
The dripping grew into steady streams and the old, musty carpet of the Toluca Room began to turn red.
A sound like a heartbeat drummed up through the floor and Augusta yipped her disgusted surprise. The heart beat again and the blood dripping from the books shot into the air in great steaming spurts. It was like watching the life flow from a slashed artery.
She was too shocked to move, staring at the room bleeding around her and feeling the heartbeat shuddering through the walls and floor, up through her feet and legs. An enclosed place of flowing blood and some other vital fluid, and a heartbeat that seemed very close but far away at the same time... it made her think of...
A womb. And at that realization, her disgust shattered her reverie and she clutched her shovel and fled, flinging open the door to sprint through the stinking darkness beyond. As she ran she heard the door slam shut behind her and had she turned around she would have seen jets of blood spraying against the door's large square glass window.
She ran through the darkness surrounded by ranks of shelves that were suddenly alive with an obscene shuffling. The air smelled of dust and mold, and past the study area, the light that reached from the front of the library began to grow stronger. There was something – someone – watching from a place in front of the grand front doors, blocking her way out, but she couldn't tell who or what it might be because the spiral staircase at the front of the building blocked more than just a glimpse.. Augusta thought of turning back to try to find another way out, but two towering bookshelves slammed together behind her, and she screamed as she felt the wind from their collision puff forward. Had she been in their path they would have crushed her.
Now the shelves were moving forward and if she fell and they scraped over her they would reduce her to a smear on the floor, torn muscle and broken bone mixed with chips of shattered tile.
Running forward, two more large bookcases slammed together with a metallic clang, then two more, and two more, and two more, and two more. She could hear books flying from shelves behind her and tumbling to the floor. Her shoes pounded against the old tiles. Weeping Mary blocked the doors, she saw. Weeping Mary hovering in the air, but seated as though in a magnificent throne.
She had to dodge the coiled iron staircase to reach the great central circle beneath the glass dome high overhead, and as she reached the circle, where the thousand-pointed star looked like a massive blossom in marble, the final two bookshelves, those closest to the entrance, tried to meet and instead slammed hard into the staircase. Metal squealed a protest.
The floor was slick , and Augusta dropped to a crouch before she could slip and fall.
"A little blood and you come running? You're quite easy to frighten, are you not, dear?" said Weeping Mary through a wide smile.
Augusta said nothing. Weeping Mary was naked but for her sunglasses, seated on nothing in the air and cradling a perversely distended stomach, purple, veined, and bulging as something inside moved.
Augusta felt her lips quivering and imagined her face as revulsion rippled across it in waves. She pushed herself back, scooting away from the nasty thing she saw hovering in the air and lit from behind with the weak light of the tall, tall window. Water dripped from the broken places in the dome.
She felt the wind of it before she could turn and see, scream, and flatten herself on the floor as books, hundreds of them, came hurtling out of the darkness. Weeping Mary screamed laughter as the books converged, snapping into place with a flutter of pages and the crackling of their plastic dust jackets. Augusta watched a throne take shape. It built itself from the floor in a flurry of flying books that clapped together and clapped together and clapped together until the storm had spent itself in the space of a handful of seconds.
"Mm... Much better," Weeping Mary murmured. "A queen must have a throne, and surely now you know that I am a queen, do you not? Did you not come to this place to learn about me?"
"I-I d-did."
"Did you not learn then, that I am more than a queen?"
Augusta said quietly, "People used to worship you as a god."
"And they still do, my darling," Weeping Mary chuckled. "Some still do. And that's as it should be after all, because I AM a god."
Augusta slowly stood, saying nothing.
Weeping Mary looked immensely pleased. "Oh, you may believe the nonsense of your scarred god, but it's only because you are too foolish to believe the evidence of your eyes."
"Did you know that five years ago I very nearly walked in your world? Oh yes, it's true. I very nearly did. But the Ehisdv-Uhutsi–"
At the sound of the word from Weeping Mary's lips, it seemed as if the whole world vibrated and Augusta reeled on her feet from a sudden flash of dizziness and whimpered.
Weeping Mary giggled. "My Captive was incomplete. I could only eat half of the child's soul. It's been a very long time since the ritual of the Ehisdv-Uhutsi–"
The sudden vertigo again. Augusta clenched her teeth and her fists to make it pass.
"–was performed, you understand. And when the flawed ritual was performed again, to provide me with another half-a-soul to consume so that with a single soul I might feast on the suffering of my Captives, it just seemed that everything went wrong..."
Weeping Mary was changing. Her skin lightened and her hair flashed golden and spilled in waves across her shoulders, and she said in a Southern accent, "Everything just fucked up a storm of wrong, I suppose you could say."
"My priestess gave me two Captives, and I ate half the soul of each, but you know something, darlin'? Even when I melted my two Captives together, everything was still just so royally fucked that I surprised myself and just stepped right into your world. I didn't especially want to at the time, but I did, and a man with a rifle shot me back here.'
She had changed again, and was now Asian and impossibly beautiful but for that hideous swollen stomach.
"Oh, I don't know if I'll do it again any time soon, though I know my people wish me to. I'll think about it. In fact, there's a girl out there just five years old now, but a part of me is riding along in her tiny little womb."
Augusta started as though slapped.
"That's right, sweetie," Weeping Mary laughed, "She's out there right now in a place called Portland, Maine, but some day she'll come back. Some day I'll call her here and she'll bring that little piece of me here and I just might step into your world again. I'd like you to think about that if you'd be so kind, please. I want you to die worried because that would taste simply delightful."
The thing inside her roiling stomach seemed agitated, as if it wanted out. Weeping Mary spread her legs, her skin tanning and her hair falling down in the shiny curls again as she did, and a fountain of fluid jetted through the air from her vagina, spattering on the iron staircase.
"It's amazing how it happened," she said calmly as something huge began to emerge from inside her, "But somehow your scarred god's whore managed to spirit away the other half of my first Captive's soul, and had laid her nasty hand on the other half of the soul of the second Captive, and when it was all said and done, it was your god's whore who managed to create a tiny girl- child with a pure soul to give to that man with his rifle."
A head had emerged, slick and cowled with glistening sac. Augusta fumbled for her gun, trying not to suffocate in her horror. Her lungs felt as if they had forgotten how to work properly.
"Pure soul or not though, I'm in her body, and so someday I'll have her."
Oh, sweet Christ in heaven. Amniotic fluid poured over the books in sheets. The thing emerging was gigantic, the size of a fully grown man, and maybe that's what it was, but Weeping Mary made sounds of pleasure as it emerged.
Augusta raised the gun, thumbed the safety, aimed, and fired. Weeping Mary's left breast exploded.
And Weeping Mary laughed, and it was a sound that rolled over Augusta and through the deserted library as though she it was the best joke she'd heard in years.
"You can't hurt me in my world, my love," she said, "Only in your world. Only in yours, which is quite a mighty problem for you, I'd think."
As her breast grew back as perfect as it had ever been, Weeping Mary arched her back, and moaned blissfully as the thing inside slipped out. It was indeed a man. A black man, perfectly formed and firmly muscled, slick with Weeping Mary's fluids, his head wrapped in a caul like a hangman's hood. He lay in a puddle spreading across the many-pointed star on the floor, dazed.
His legs twitched and as he sat up, an arm reached up to the caul to tear it away, and it came away in glistening pieces.
Weeping Mary laughed and blood and warm fluids still ran from between her legs. Her belly looked like a giant deflated balloon and hung down from the throne in a swoon of stretched flesh.
Augusta screamed, and tried to hide her face, but with her shovel in one hand and the gun in the other, she couldn't.
Weeping Mary had given birth to Joseph.