“I know, I know,” Armfield said. “And I’m sorry, I am. It must be so confusing. But I know someone who can help.” He stepped past Ben and started down the stairs. “Come on,” he said.
Ben followed him down to the first floor. Before they reached the library, he saw the orange flicker of a fire dance across the hallway ceiling.
Lisbeth was staring out the window at the blank fields. When she turned to him, the flames from the fireplace threw into relief the hollows of her face.
“I need to find my family, Lisbeth,” Ben said.
“We all do, Ben. This won’t take long, and that’s God’s truth. To tell it right might take longer, but the time for that has passed, and I’m sorry for that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Have you ever tried to tell a story to a child and had to leave out the ugliest parts of it?” she asked him. “But when you make it easier to swallow—to protect their precious ears—the story just doesn’t quite mean as much. Sometimes the savage parts and the important parts are the same. You can see that, can’t you?”
“What are you talking about?” Ben asked.
“Your questions, Ben,” Lisbeth said. “You must have them, sure as I have the answers to them, even if it’d be an easier thing not to have to hear them.”
She pulled a sheath of handwritten pages out of her jacket. They were protected in a plastic folder, but Ben could still see that they were written in the hand of a woman who’d been taught penmanship with a flourish. He recognized the dates at the top of each letter and the signature at the bottom. Ben remembered that Lisbeth had told him that she was named after Elizabeth Swann.
December 21, 1777
Dear Kathy,
At last we have found salvation, Kathy.
Father has told us again of the Coptic saints, who sustained themselves in fierce deserts by faith alone. Through the purity gained from that sacrifice, they achieved true communion with the Lord. These ancient saints could not eat less than we do, and I cannot conceive of a place less fit for man than these frozen mountains. It is no wonder that the Lord in His wisdom has acted through us, as well.
Mother and Father have heard him, and so have many of the others. I, too, have heard voices in the night, but I confess that I cannot discern the words, though I try so hard to.
James has been bound to the elder tree. He alone of us has persisted in bodily strength, and so God has set him apart from the rest. It is wondrous to behold God’s work in this, Kathy. Skin peels from the rest of us in sheets, and hair falls aside in clumps, but James is at his most handsome. They have bound him with chains to the elder tree. No less was demanded of Abraham when he was commanded to deliver unto the Lord his only son.
I hear him call to me from the cold, and his cries cut me like a blade. This is as it should be, for if we did not suffer, then our sacrifice would count for naught. We cut out the best part of ourselves to demonstrate our faith. Our strength comes from our suffering.
I look at my calendar, and I cannot credit that a mere ten weeks have passed since the attack. Everything about that old world is gone. It is a dream brought to waking. Gone is our country, gone is our village, gone is our beloved Jack, and gone are so many of our dear friends. How else to explain our sudden misfortune than by the intervention of the beast? But now the Lord had returned to show us to salvation.
Though we are proud to fight as his soldiers, it was a folly for our ancestors to come to this place, Kathy. It was arrogance that led us into this winter. I have read Grandfather’s journals. How blessed he must have counted himself to believe that we alone in all of history are a people untethered by the past. That we are creatures of splendor, forging a new country in a new world. How wrong he was.
We shall remember James always. Faith and memory are what shall ever keep this valley from the beast’s grasp.
You cannot fully understand what has transpired here, Kathy. It is a thing not seen since the time of Christ Himself. That is how important our part is. Does that sound like blasphemy to you, sister? Perhaps it is, but, then, what wisdom did not first begin as such blasphemy? As hard as our lot is, we between the mountains cannot tread wrong in His service. Not where demons desecrate His land, and much-loved children are laid out in offering.
Have faith, Kathy. Only the strongest can keep up the light in a world that has become so dark.
Your Bess
50
Spare me your horrified looks, Ben. Truth is, we in this valley might well be the last people in all the world who haven’t lost our minds. Think on what greeted the first Christians when they delivered the word to the heathen lands: ridicule, torture, and death. So save your smart talk. Do not pretend that this hasn’t happened before.
We’ve told you of the Winter Siege. The hunger and the cold. What the Iroquois didn’t take, the demon in the woods tried to make its own. The Iroquois called it a wendigo: a starving man in thrall to a spirit with a hunger so great it cannot be slaked. The Indians worship false gods, but their demons are as real as ours. What can’t you believe? If your twenty-first-century mind needs a twenty-first-century answer, imagine it as an Indian brought to madness by unspeakable hunger. Your kind wraps the old illnesses with words long enough to disguise the fact that you know nothing about the darkness that can grow in the human heart. Whether the man was ill or possessed by a creature from the abyss or taken by the very shade of Lucifer himself changes nothing.
What matters is that the beast tried our faith that winter as he once tested Job’s. And our faith did not fail. God tested our obedience as he once tested Abraham’s. And our obedience did not falter.