There are only so many omens and portents you can shrug off before the multi-verse slaps you in the face with an unmistakable Sign of Things to Come.
A blood-red sky in the morning, the milk boiling over, a lone silver rose blazing in the depths of winter, seven ravens across a blushing moon, a black cat crossing your path.
But when she looked up from a sink of suds and hand-blown glasses, she finally had to admit that it was a red-letter day.
The church bell tolled solemnly the eighth hour, warning the citizenry to hurry behind stout doors and barred windows. A sense of urgency permeated the air as flying hooves beat a tattoo on the hard-packed surface of an empty road somewhere just out of sight. When the bell tolled out it's chime across the village that never sleeps, she found herself quite remarkably on a deserted corner intersection somewhere deep in the West End.
The Deacon's pew, as the town criers referred to it, had always evoked the most profound sense of disquiet in her.
In the city of Warpara, where she grew up, it sat on the corner of Westglen and Rook Lane, where no pew had any business to sit. It wasn't a rest stop. The nearest park lay fifteen blocks to the west, the closest church two blocks away. No library or community hall or school graced the entire length of Westglen Avenue or Rook Lane. Not when she was a child, not now, and as far as she knew, not ever.
The pew was green, or, more precisely, it had once been painted a rather unnatural sea-green shade. Over the years the paint had flaked, peeled, and chipped away, leaving only traces of the original hue caught in the splintery cracks of the wooden slats of the pew's seat and back. The legs were cement — or concrete, she could never tell the difference — dark gray now with age, weathering, and exposure to time; pitted and crumbling.
Not an inviting place to sit, one would think. Not a spot upon which to while away a summer afternoon leafing through a newspaper, a fresh spring morning chatting with a friend, a brand-new autumn day just watching the world go by.
A nice place to sit, no.
One wouldn't think so, and one would be right, especially as the sun never did seem to shine on it; even on the brightest, clearest days the pew squatted in perpetual shade, cast into murky, somehow dank-seeming shadow by some impenetrable cloud hanging directly above it.
This is simply how she remembered it, one might object; as a child and adolescent she had seen the pew in shadow on a handful of occasions, and either willfully or through some innocent trick of memory, she failed to recall the many times she must have seen it bathed in sunlight or dappled by moonlight or heaped with snow.
One would be wrong.
Season after season, year after year, the pew was ever and only in shadow. The sight was particularly disturbing on naturally overcast days. In the general mundane grayness one found it difficult to distinguish exactly where the deeper, danker grayness enveloping the pew began.
For this reason she always walked on the other side of the street on cloudy days. Even then, somehow, despite the dread that gripped her, she could not stop herself from pausing to watch the pew for some minutes, minutes that on occasion stretched into hours.
Sometimes she returned home so late that as punishment her parents confined her to her bedroom without an evening meal. Several times her father castigated her physically. Still, whenever she walked by the corner of Rook Lane and Westglen, she had to stop and watch the pew.
The pew, and its occupants.
For the decrepit, splintering, crumbling pew was rarely vacant. At noon, at midnight, in the sweltering days of August and the bone-freezing nights of February, the old men sat on the pew.
Old men she'd thought them as a child, and old men she thought them now, so many years later.
Wrong city, but the same pew. The same old men.
She stood across the street, ice in her stomach and cold sweat trickling down her back.
There had been no necessity for her to trudge through the crime-riddled, trash-strewn streets of West Side, past boarded-up houses and shops whose rolled-down metal shutters were sealed with rust, no need at all to scuffle down block after block of broken pavement until she reached the intersections of Broodmare and King's Row.
They were the same men.
Fool, she admonished herself, though her heart was pounding. If the men who sat on this pew twenty and more years ago were old — and granted that even the mere middle-aged might appear incredibly ancient in a child's eyes — they yet had to be long dead by this date. These were other men" Other old men"
A sensation like that of the furry feet of a palm-sized spider scurried up her spine.
With the same slumped backs and misshapen shoulders, the same fingerless gloves covering overlarge hands, the same knit caps pulled down over low yet bulging foreheads"
The same faces"
Their sons, she thought, her heart fluttering in a disquieting manner high in her chest. Nephews. Continuing some neighborhood tradition, a particular family laying claim to the single pew in the area and occupying it by a tacit but generally acknowledged right for decades.
Quite a ridiculous rationalization, that, since she was not in Warpara, but Rhydin. She'd admit it freely.
A blood-red sky in the morning, the milk boiling over, a lone silver rose blazing in the depths of winter, seven ravens across a blushing moon, a black cat crossing your path.
But when she looked up from a sink of suds and hand-blown glasses, she finally had to admit that it was a red-letter day.
The church bell tolled solemnly the eighth hour, warning the citizenry to hurry behind stout doors and barred windows. A sense of urgency permeated the air as flying hooves beat a tattoo on the hard-packed surface of an empty road somewhere just out of sight. When the bell tolled out it's chime across the village that never sleeps, she found herself quite remarkably on a deserted corner intersection somewhere deep in the West End.
The Deacon's pew, as the town criers referred to it, had always evoked the most profound sense of disquiet in her.
In the city of Warpara, where she grew up, it sat on the corner of Westglen and Rook Lane, where no pew had any business to sit. It wasn't a rest stop. The nearest park lay fifteen blocks to the west, the closest church two blocks away. No library or community hall or school graced the entire length of Westglen Avenue or Rook Lane. Not when she was a child, not now, and as far as she knew, not ever.
The pew was green, or, more precisely, it had once been painted a rather unnatural sea-green shade. Over the years the paint had flaked, peeled, and chipped away, leaving only traces of the original hue caught in the splintery cracks of the wooden slats of the pew's seat and back. The legs were cement — or concrete, she could never tell the difference — dark gray now with age, weathering, and exposure to time; pitted and crumbling.
Not an inviting place to sit, one would think. Not a spot upon which to while away a summer afternoon leafing through a newspaper, a fresh spring morning chatting with a friend, a brand-new autumn day just watching the world go by.
A nice place to sit, no.
One wouldn't think so, and one would be right, especially as the sun never did seem to shine on it; even on the brightest, clearest days the pew squatted in perpetual shade, cast into murky, somehow dank-seeming shadow by some impenetrable cloud hanging directly above it.
This is simply how she remembered it, one might object; as a child and adolescent she had seen the pew in shadow on a handful of occasions, and either willfully or through some innocent trick of memory, she failed to recall the many times she must have seen it bathed in sunlight or dappled by moonlight or heaped with snow.
One would be wrong.
Season after season, year after year, the pew was ever and only in shadow. The sight was particularly disturbing on naturally overcast days. In the general mundane grayness one found it difficult to distinguish exactly where the deeper, danker grayness enveloping the pew began.
For this reason she always walked on the other side of the street on cloudy days. Even then, somehow, despite the dread that gripped her, she could not stop herself from pausing to watch the pew for some minutes, minutes that on occasion stretched into hours.
Sometimes she returned home so late that as punishment her parents confined her to her bedroom without an evening meal. Several times her father castigated her physically. Still, whenever she walked by the corner of Rook Lane and Westglen, she had to stop and watch the pew.
The pew, and its occupants.
For the decrepit, splintering, crumbling pew was rarely vacant. At noon, at midnight, in the sweltering days of August and the bone-freezing nights of February, the old men sat on the pew.
Old men she'd thought them as a child, and old men she thought them now, so many years later.
Wrong city, but the same pew. The same old men.
She stood across the street, ice in her stomach and cold sweat trickling down her back.
There had been no necessity for her to trudge through the crime-riddled, trash-strewn streets of West Side, past boarded-up houses and shops whose rolled-down metal shutters were sealed with rust, no need at all to scuffle down block after block of broken pavement until she reached the intersections of Broodmare and King's Row.
They were the same men.
Fool, she admonished herself, though her heart was pounding. If the men who sat on this pew twenty and more years ago were old — and granted that even the mere middle-aged might appear incredibly ancient in a child's eyes — they yet had to be long dead by this date. These were other men" Other old men"
A sensation like that of the furry feet of a palm-sized spider scurried up her spine.
With the same slumped backs and misshapen shoulders, the same fingerless gloves covering overlarge hands, the same knit caps pulled down over low yet bulging foreheads"
The same faces"
Their sons, she thought, her heart fluttering in a disquieting manner high in her chest. Nephews. Continuing some neighborhood tradition, a particular family laying claim to the single pew in the area and occupying it by a tacit but generally acknowledged right for decades.
Quite a ridiculous rationalization, that, since she was not in Warpara, but Rhydin. She'd admit it freely.