When they found her minutes later, crumpled and unconscious on the second-floor landing, it was believed she'd had a fall. She was carried into what had been her grandmother's bedroom and laid on the dead woman's bed. There were some who felt uneasy about using the chamber of one so recently departed, and a younger brother wondered aloud if her fall hadn't perhaps been occasioned by a glimpse of the grandmother's ghost, stalking the attic overhead. But the Brethren were, above all, a practical people and not inclined to place much importance on such concerns. They knew they had nothing to fear from ghosts.
She had lain all that day as if under a spell, barely breathing enough to stir a goose-down feather held beneath her nose. Her face had become as rigid as a mask; when they peeled a lid back, they found the eye turned up in her head so that Utile more than the white showed, as if she were gazing at the inside of her skull. Her family feared for her life and, having just buried one of their number, spent the hours in prayer, begging the Lord to content Himself with the pious old woman He had so recently taken to His bosom and to spare this unworthy child. But if He heard them, He made no sign.
The trance had continued through the night and into the following morning, a hot, windless day that turned the old house into a furnace. Brethren gathered on the first floor to mop their brows and pray for the girl's soul, many quietly preparing themselves for a second funeral. A few even wondered if this wasn't perhaps a judgement on the whole Troet clan and its strange contrary ways.
And so things had remained until evening of the second day, when suddenly the girl's eyes opened and she sat bolt upright, startling those assembled at the bedside with a scream that sounded like 'The burning!' She was quickly declared to be out of danger; her dramatic awakening seemed merely to have been the culmination of a nightmare, and her family was relieved to discover that, despite her cry, she appeared to have no fever.
But the nightmare had been real, she'd been sure of it. She'd been flooded with visions, lying there, images of murder. Somewhere just outside Gilead a girl very like herself was about to die. There was light, and a tree, and an odd design with three concentric rings…
Her confused ravings were not entirely dismissed – the Brethren took such warnings seriously, aware that the Lord occasionally allowed men glimpses of events to come- but it was difficult to make sense of what she said. A tree? There were thousands of trees not half a mile from the house. A girl? It could be anyone's sister or daughter. And as for the design she'd babbled of, what were they to make of it? They could hardly be expected to act upon a prophecy so vague.
And in the end she had relented. Perhaps they were right, her family and the others; perhaps it had been a nightmare after all, brought on by her discovery of the Pictures – whose existence she'd been desperately anxious to keep secret.
Two days later a group of hunters had come upon the partially burned body of a girl from a nearby village, suspended from a tree in the part of the woods they called McKinney's Neck.
She had felt, in part, responsible for the death. A vision had been vouchsafed her, and she had failed to heed it. Never again would she allow this to happen.
That had been in 1939. Since then, over the years, she had sifted the Pictures many times, though always without joy, studying them at night by her bedside. She no longer had to see them all; merely staring at a few of the now-familiar images, drawn at random from the pile, was enough. Invariably the dreams would come.
She had never told a soul about the source of her knowledge. The community had no suspicion. The Brethren regarded her as a model of piety, and, after her first prophecy had been proved true, they accorded her a superstitious respect not untinged with fear, coming to her often for advice. She doubted they'd look kindly upon her use of the Pictures.
She detested them herself; she knew what dreadful visions had inspired them. She knew the identity of the dark, formless creature, and the terrible things it could do. She'd learned what the circular design meant, and where it was to be used. And she knew – had always known – who had drawn them all. Even in those first dreams in her grandmother's house, she had seen in the Pictures the hand of her vanished ancestor, the boy Absolom Troet.
Over the years she had come to suspect, if dimly, what the boy's instructions might have been. And she trembled at them. For beneath the dreams that the Pictures inspired loomed a great black certainty that haunted every waking hour, a vision of the future which, as a young girl, then a housewife, now a solitary widow, she felt powerless to alter or prevent.
Though she knew she'd have to try. Surely the Lord expected nothing less.
In recent years, like one who leaves unread a message of bad tidings, she had resorted to the Pictures less frequently – had avoided them, in fact, preferring to leave them tucked safely inside the great leather-bound Bible on the nightstand by her bed, as if to thereby make them holy. She had no need to open the Bible; its every word was as familiar to her as the images Absolom had drawn.
'And now, Lord, what wait I for? My hope is in thee… '
She frowned as she moved farther down the hill, troubled by what she saw: the scattered clumps of rosebushes, the late-blooming teas and early-blooming damasks and mosses that grew here and there above the stream. They reminded her of something.
For just last night, aware that a visitor, an outsider, was due among them this May Day, and knowing with dread that, exactly as prophesied, a month with two full moons lay ahead, she had succumbed to curiosity and the demands of conscience. At bedtime she had opened the Bible, slipped out the Pictures, drawn forth at random the images of moon, rose, and serpent…
The dream, she recalled now, had been set right here, in this garden, by that moss-rose halfway down the slope.
Darkly it came back to her.
She'd been walking here, just as she was now. Only it had been night, and hot, and moonlit. One leaf on the moss-rose bush had looked different from the others in the ghostly light: a single leaf half hidden by the night shadows of the damasks, but her sharp eyes had picked it out from several yards away. There seemed to be – there at the tip – an odd, unnatural whiteness…
No, not just at the tip. She saw as she drew nearer that the entire leaf was edged in whiteness, the dark familiar greenness in retreat, as from a creeping frost or a cold invisible fire.
She ran her fingers over its surface; she was sensitive to plants, they spoke to her in a hundred furtive ways, and surely this one had secrets to reveal…
Her fingers, this time, told her nothing. Around her the air throbbed with the buzzing of unseen bees. Grasping the rose branch, she tugged lightly at the leaf. There was a sudden stinging pain, and with a cry she yanked back her hand. Protruding from the fleshy area just below her thumb was a pale green thorn snapped off jaggedly at the base. She pulled it out; it was curved, wicked-looking, nearly an inch long. How had she failed to see it in the moonlight?
The buzzing had grown louder, more insistent. As she brought her wounded hand to her lips, the blood flowing salty and warm, something occurred at the end of the branch just inches from her face.
A rosebud moved.
Her eyes widened. Why hadn't she noticed it before? The bud was fatter than the others, the skin moist and somehow pulpy-looking. It was clinging to the thin branch like a lump of rotting meat.
Warily she reached for it. It shifted at her touch. The air shrilled with an angry insect sound that clamored like a warning in her ears, and there beneath the radiance of the moon, in the heat of that rose-perfumed night, she felt a chill.
Torn from the branch, the bud seemed heavy in her hand. Her fingers probed the dark-veined leafy covering. One by one the leaves peeled back; like a piece of hollow fruit the skin split and fell away. Inside lay a pale, ropy thing curled like a length of intestine. As the moonlight fell on it, it stirred.
She saw now what it was: a plump white worm, thick as a baby's finger – a plump white worm that, as she watched, uncurled, raised its unwrinkled head, and glared at her. A plump white worm with a human face.
Grimacing, she dropped it to the ground. She was sure she heard the creature scream as she crushed it beneath her shoe: scream words at her as from a human mouth, human lungs, a human throat, words in some dark ancient tongue she'd never heard spoken aloud, but whose meaning, upon waking, she'd felt sure she understood.
And now, just this afternoon, she had seen the visitor, all plump and pink and innocent, arriving with her son. She had recognized something in his innocent face. The dream had not lied. The Pictures were real. For the first time in her life, she felt too tired to pray.
