Cherie Priest by Dreadful Skin

Author:Dreadful Skin [Skin, Dreadful]
Format: epub
Tags: Occult, Historical - General, 1865-1898, Horror, Fiction - Horror, Nuns, Fiction, United States, Werewolves, Horror - General, Historical, History
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2007-03-14T08:00:00+00:00

By and by

When the morning comes

All the saints

Will be gathered as one

Trials dark

At every hand

We'll understand it better

By and by

It was percussive and seductive, with a rhythm like African voices—and Eileen thought perhaps it was a slave song, passed along and down and over the mountains. Songs pass so easily across rivers, and deserts, and decades. This one stirred Eileen in a primitive way, all the hands beating together like drums.

At the back of the tent there was disapproval. There were shaking heads and children being pulled away, back outside, by one hand or both.

But more than the disapproval there was naked interest written on the faces that were coming to fill the tent. There was eagerness, and pleasure, and a gentle throb of bodies as they moved themselves forward, closer. Closer to the stage. Closer to the girl. Closer to God.

Eileen joined them.

She found her way close to the front, three or four rows of heads in front of hers. Up towards the wooden stage that echoed, smacked, reverberated with the gleeful stomp of fervent feet. On tip-toes she stood, straining to see.

Back against the far corner of the stage there was a piano, and standing beside that were two bearded men whose elbows were pumping madly at their bows and fiddles. There was no sign of Leonard anymore, but she could smell that he'd been nearby. A faint trail marked his body's passing, weaving and bobbing between the worshippers where he earned his way forward—but it was a hard trail to hold, so cluttered with the stink and motion of other bodies.

Eileen was holding her head up, sniffing, listening with her nose. When she realized this, she dropped her chin and hoped she hadn't been seen. It embarrassed her, though it was so wonderfully helpful. But it was not a human impulse at all—it was the beast inside, and she didn't like it.

She didn't like the way the beast was tapping its foot, either. She was displeased at the pulse within, a fiendish, repetitive tug on her soul that wanted to move, to dance, to crawl forward and howl.

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