The Shrine by James Herbert

Author:James Herbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-02-08T18:21:33+00:00

* * *

George Southworth had fled toward the church wall, all dignity shed, naked terror revealed.

Everything had gone so well, his dreams easily within his grasp. The shrine—hidds project—had become a huge success, a fantastic money-spinner. He, and others in the area, those with the foresight to invest, to deal themselves in at the very beginning, were about to see their shrewd business acumen rewarded. Indeed, the rewards had already been made apparent; now they could only increase. The village of Banfield was no longer dying; it flourished and would continue to do so, just as had the French village of Lourdes, now a bustling town, a thriving community that was known worldwide.

But she, that thing, that bl less-than xggdicd monster who had impossibly risen from the dead, had looked at him, just him, and seen the greed in his heart. And she had laughed at it, and had welcomed it, for it was part of the evil that gave her existence.

He was running even before the earth had begun to tremble. Those around him were too blind to see, too horror-struck to realiz.e the meaning of this unholy resurrection.

He knew, but did not understand how he knew, that this creature was the manifestation of their own evil, that she existed on the power she drew from their own blackened souls. The awareness had struck him because she willed it so. That instigation was this creature’s torment: the realisation of one’s own infinite vileness. I he guilt that the Church taught all men to suffer was founded on actuality: the culpability was real because the wickedness had always been there in each and every person. Even in the innocent, the children. Children like Alice. He brushed by those who could only gaze up at the altar and he fought the weakness and dizziness that assailed him, knowing that catastrophe was to follow this new, obscene miracle.

Vaguely, somewhere in the far distance, he heard the hunched thing speak, one word, perhaps a name, and the echo in his mind was drowned by thunder, a sound diss loud, so shattering, so near, it seemed to rip into his heart.

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Bur he was still moving, staggering among the invalids stretched out on the ground.

“I hen there were others fleeing with him, screams breaking loose from terrified souls, entreaties from those too crippled to move. A hand grabbed at his leg and he looked down to see a wasted, skeletal man wrapped in a heavy red blanket, begging him with wide, frightened eyes to carry him away from the disorder. He knocked the yellow, withered hand away and staggered onward, the ground vibrating beneath him, the low rumble seeming to rise up through the soles of his feet to shake him like a rag doll.

It was an eternity before he reached the low wall surrounding the church grounds, and the oscillation had grown more violent. I here were others with him, those who realized the exits would be blocked, and they, too, climbed the wall, leaping into the graveyard beyond.

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