Bethany's Sin

  HOME IS THE SAFEST REFUGE…

  Bethany’s Sin. It is a strange name, but the town is pretty. Tranquil. Restful. And now it will be home for Evan Reid, his wife, Kay, and their small daughter, Laurie.

  Maybe now things will be better. Maybe now the horrible dreams will end, and the memories will fade…

  But something is wrong in Bethany’s Sin. There is the awful, deafening silence. The men—so few, so frightened. And the night riders—bands of women on horseback, galloping into the darkness.

  Something is wrong in Bethany’s Sin. And soon Evan will know all too well what it is.

  He will watch as Kay and Laurie are slowly drawn into the dreadful secret.

  He will witness the neighbors…Harris…Paul…Neely…disappear into the stillness.

  He will wait for the evil that is stalking him. Now. In the night. In…

  BETHANY’S SIN

  Books by Robert R. McCammon

  Baal

  Bethany’s Sin

  The Night Boat

  Stinger

  Swan Song

  They Thirst

  The Wolf’s Hour

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1980 by Robert R. McCammon

  Cover art copyright © 1988 Rowena Morrill

  Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-55391

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-66482-4

  First Pocket Books printing October 1988

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For my grandparents and for Penny.

  Thank you for bringing me this far.

  CONTENTS

  I - HARBINGERS

  1 - Near the Black Sea 1965

  2 - Vietnam 1970

  II - JUNE

  3 - In the Darkness 1980

  4 - The Village

  5 - The Gift and the Curse

  6 - Little Fears

  7 - The Law in Bethany’s Sin

  8 - Kay, Getting It Together

  9 - Visiting

  10 - No Way to Die Is Any Good

  11 - The Outsider, Looking In

  III - JULY

  12 - Night on the King’s Bridge Road

  13 - What Neely Saw

  14 - Tales Spoken in a Whisper

  15 - Kay’s Dream

  16 - Dr. Drago’s House

  17 - After the Party

  18 - Behind the Museum’s Door

  19 - Things Unearthed

  20 - The Cock’s Crow

  21 - Secrets

  22 - Wysinger, Afraid, and Evan Seeking

  IV - AUGUST

  23 - Home

  24 - In Room 36

  25 - Mrs. Bartlett’s Kitchen

  26 - To the Landfill

  27 - The Women

  28 - The Decision

  29 - Evan, Waiting for the Night

  30 - Fire and Iron

  V - AFTERWARD

  31 - Ruins and Beginnings

  Postgraph

  Afterword

  About the Author

  I

  * * *

  HARBINGERS

  1

  * * *

  Near the Black Sea

  1965

  THE WOMAN’S SHADOW, falling across the diagrams spread out on a folding metal table, made the men look up.

  In the air were the thick smells of heat and dust, sweat, sweet Turkish tobacco; the sun baked the droppings of the stray, slat-ribbed dogs that occasionally yapped around the timber-enforced excavation, and dark circles of flies danced above the men’s heads, nipping at unprotected ears and cheeks. Had it not been for the large timber-stilt-supported roof of corrugated tin over the excavation, the sun would have driven the men insane weeks before. From the main excavation, a rectangle that sloped from six feet to over twenty, trenches snaked out in all directions, angling around huge boulders and mounds of broken stone. There were the noises of digging: picks striking rock, shovels pushing aside coarse, stubborn earth. Occasionally the wind brought the sharp salt tang of the Black Sea rolling across the pit like a breath from another world. It was hot July, and the sun was the blazing eye of a cyclops in a face of azure.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Vodantis greeted the woman, nodding his head slightly. Sweat had collected in the pockets beneath his dark-rimmed eyes. He had been at the site since six-thirty, and while the Hotel Imperiale in the four-mile-distant village of Caraminya was hot, it was nothing like the heavy heat out here in the hill country. He felt scorched and covered with dust, though his khaki suit was relatively clean compared to those worn by the others.

  The woman returned the nod. She was tall and large-boned, with a deeply tanned face framed by a well-groomed mane of loosely curled hair the color of midnight shadows. She wore old, faded denims and brown work boots, a cotton blouse, and a simple gold chain around her throat. An olive-green backpack was strapped around her shoulders.

  “Here. This is what I wanted you to see. Excuse, please.” Dr. Vodantis leaned across his young field assistant and turned one of the diagrams toward the woman. There were distinct lines to indicate the trenches and the central pit, and broken lines in circular and rectangular and oblong shapes. He traced a finger along one of the trenches. “Here” he said. The finger angled to the left and tapped at a broken-lined square with a question mark at the center of it. “It’s perhaps…oh…a hundred yards from this amphitheater. One of the Turkish workers found it yesterday morning.”

  The other men watched her. Her eyes—stunning, deep sapphire against the darkness of her flesh—narrowed very slightly. In the distance there was the rumble of a bulldozer. “I see,” the woman said finally. “An opening? Into what?”

  “How far back into the mountain it goes we don’t know yet,” Dr. Vodantis said. “Dr. Markos’s assistant crawled into it for a distance yesterday.” He glanced across at Dr. Markos, a gaunt man with a shock of white hair and a bristle of beard.

  “For only four meters,” Dr. Markos said, addressing the woman. “I called him back because I feel the tunnel is too dangerous to explore fully yet. The ceiling is unstable; we’ll need hydraulic supports before we can send anyone in.”

  “What did he find?”

  “That it has a gradual downward slope. It began to constrict before he turned back.” He tried to keep his gaze steady, but it was difficult because in this woman’s eyes there was a piercing kind of…yes, power. He knew her reputation well; he had worked on a Crete dig with her three years before, and though he did not like her techniques, he respected her intelligence. He’d seen firelight reflected in her eyes once, on a night when the stars were strung like a vast tapestry across the sky and the voices of ghosts whispered in the corridors of a ruined temple; some dark and awesome determination had crept across her face, shadowing her features, and he had thought in that instant that the spiderish hand of the oracle had been laid upon her shoulder. “Before I send any of my team in,” he told her, “I want to make certain of their safety. A shift of stones could bring the mountain down into that tunnel. After all”—he smiled slightly while the woman’s face remained expressionless—“whatev
er lies inside has been there since 1200 B.C. I think it will wait.” He glanced over at the others for support.

  “An approximate date,” the woman said quietly, her eyes expressionless. “And it would seem to me as an archaeologist you would be more…willing…to take necessary risks.”

  “Necessary. Ah. there’s the key word.” Dr. Markos took a chipped briar pipe from a breast pocket, struck a match, and touched it to the already charred tobacco. “Has it occurred to you that it might be a natural cave with no connection to these ruins at all? If that’s the case, there could be a drop-off, a wall of solid rock, a winding labyrinth of passages from which no man could ever find his way out again. I find nothing about that particular site so remarkable that it merits a hasty and dangerous exploration.” He tapped another square on the diagram. “Now, here where the weapons were found…”

  “I disagree,” the woman said, still calm. “I say that the city was built in a semicircle around the mountain’s base for two reasons: strategy, in case of attack, and…”

  Dr. Markos raised his eyebrows; a tendril of tobacco smoke wound itself above his head.

  “…as protection,” she said, “perhaps for what lies within that tunnel.”

  “Pure speculation,” Dr. Markos said, smiling slightly.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to agree,” Dr. Vodantis said.

  “You have a right to disagree with me,” she told them. “I have a right to believe in what I feel is true. Dr. Vodantis, I’d like to see that opening now.” Without waiting for him, she turned her back on the group of men and began walking down into the pit toward the trenches. Each step took her backward in time. Teams of Turkish and Greek workers huddled around the gradual, painstaking uncovering of rough, time-etched brickworks; there were tables of chalk-numbered stones and fragments of stones, each part of the multilayered puzzle of this ancient place. At the far side of the pit a long stone stairway was beginning to emerge from the earth. Dr. Vodantis stepped in front of her.

  “This way, please,” he said, entering a trench that sloped downward at a thirty-degree angle.

  The earth has moved in its wary sleep, the woman thought as she followed Dr. Vodantis down; the earth has shrugged its shoulders, drawn a deep breath, shifted beneath the harsh touch of nature and the harsher touch of men. On each side of the trench the brickworks were slowly asserting themselves again through the walls of yellow dirt. There were windows and doorways, clogged with rock and ancient debris; on one of the walls there was a great black scorch mark, the signature of flame. The woman paused and touched it, her eyes glittering. And then she followed the man into the maw of time.

  Her blood was racing. High above her there was an open space in the makeshift ceiling, and she could see the blinding blue sky and the ominous, purple black outline of the mountain towering overhead. Something dark sailed across her field of vision toward the rim of the nearest cliff. An eagle, flying to its aerie overlooking the emerald plain of the sea. “Watch your step, please,” Dr. Vodantis said. “A wall’s just taking shape here.” They stepped over black-crusted rubble and continued down.

  Who has walked here before me? she asked herself. Whose flesh and blood moved through the narrow corridors of this sprawling fortress? For that’s what it was; she’d known as soon as she’d read the excavation progress reports and seen the diagrams and photographs at her hotel. A huge walled fortress with its back to the mountains and its stern face to the Black Sea. Built by whose hand? This city would have remained lost had it not been for the earthquake in December, a tremor that had jarred most of Caraminya into rubble and killed more than thirty people. Now the streets of Caraminya looked haunted and silent, just like this centuries-older place. A split in the earth had uncovered a single wall of ancient bricks, blackened by flame but with a soul jarring story to tell.

  For the woman already knew.

  Not just hoped, no, because hope had an element of fear in it as well. And she was not a person to feel fear. She knew.

  She had the sudden feeling that the mountain was looming before her like a huge house of solid rock. A house waiting to welcome her home. A cloud of flies hovered greedily above her head, as if their collective genetic memory recalled a heap of rotting, sunbaked, sword-hacked corpses lying in these pathways. A stagnant breeze, filled with the breath of the dead, blew across her and then was gone. In its wake she thought she heard the clash of weapons and the harsh, high laughter of warrior hordes, but it was only the noise of shovels scraping stone and two of the university volunteers laughing over a private joke.

  “Here,” Dr. Vodantis said.

  Where the trench ended lay a jumble of large broken-edged boulders. A pile of irregularly shaped stones had been marked with chalk and covered with a sheet of clear plastic, and two young workers in denims and T-shirts were busy brushing the loose earth away from an emerging wall; they glanced up and nodded at Dr. Vodantis. He motioned toward the jigsaw of boulders. “You can see where the opening’s been cleared,” he told the woman.

  She moved closer to it. There was a dark, triangular hole between two of the largest stones; she knelt before it and reached in with one arm, feeling the jagged rocks wedged together at the ceiling. She shrugged off her backpack, unstrapped a compartment, and withdrew a plastic flashlight. Switching on the light, she peered into the tunnel. It continued far beyond the light’s range, like an empty eye socket leading into the black recesses of a time-ravaged skull; jagged teeth of stone glittered, and she saw that the tunnel was perhaps two feet high and barely the width of her shoulders. “I’m going inside,” she said after another moment.

  “Please,” the man said, stepping toward her. “I can’t allow that. At least wait until the safety equipment arrives, perhaps three days at most…”

  But she hadn’t heard because she was already moving forward. Before Dr. Vodantis could stop her, she had slipped into the opening, working her shoulders in and then pushing with her legs. In another moment the ribbed soles of her work boots had vanished into darkness.

  “God in Heaven,” Dr. Vodantis muttered, shaking his head from side to side. He felt the eyes of the student volunteers on him, and he turned toward them and threw up his hands in frustration.

  Within the cramped tunnel the woman crawled behind the thin beam of light. Dr. Vodantis was a fool, she thought; worse, he was as much a coward as Markos. Archaeologists all, and on the verge of a discovery that might very well rock the world. It was foolish not to take necessary risks to uncover the truth, if it was the truth these men were seeking. She worked her way deeper. The walls and ceiling were ragged rims of rock; something caught at her sleeve, and with her next movement she heard the cloth rip. Farther ahead the tunnel turned to the right, and she was aware of descending, a degree every few feet. Poised above her like a waiting juggernaut was the mountain, all the many thousand tons of it, and she could smell the cold, iron-dry smell of the rock itself. The tunnel began to constrict gradually; rock scraped her shoulders with every movement until her raw flesh screamed. In the distance she heard a voice, and she stopped, letting the echoes wash over her like ocean waves. It was Dr. Vodantis, calling her name from the tunnel’s entrance. She hunched her shoulders together and continued on. For ahead of her, buried in tons of stone, buried by the deceptions and lies and crooked paths of time, lay the past. And today she would uncover the truth.

  She stopped after a few meters because her shoulder had scraped something strange. She shone the light on the wall to her left, ran a hand across it. Smooth stone, cold to the touch. A wall fashioned by human hands. Before thousands of years of rockslides and earthquakes, this had been a passageway into the heart of the mountain. The hand of mystery was on this place, and as she crawled forward she thought she could hear the powerful voice of a Jason shouting orders to his Argonauts, the thundering gait of a Heracles striding a battlefield, the rumble and clash of a storm of armored warriors fighting face-to-face in a sea of carnage. Her blood was singing ancient songs. A cold chi
ll grasped her spine and slowly worked its way through her.

  For ahead, outlined in the cold touch of the light, was another hole.

  The breath hissed through her teeth. Shoulders scraped and bleeding, she pushed herself toward the tunnel’s end. There was another jam of rocks, and the hole was so small she couldn’t look into it and probe with the light at the same time. A musty, dry reek of age hung within that hole, beckoning her with a skeletal finger. She realized she was having trouble breathing because of the denseness of the air, and she was going to have to work fast. She placed the palm of her hand against one of the smaller stones bordering the hole and pushed against it; it wouldn’t budge. She tried another. There had to be a keystone here, a rock that would slide off balance and loosen the others so she could move through into…what? Her heart hammered. She put her shoulder against stone and pushed, the effort raising beads of sweat across her face. Harder. Harder. It was solid; there was no way. Her shoulder and spine ached, and she planted her feet against the tunnel walls for more strength. Something shifted. She gasped, held her breath, pushed again. There was the noise of rock grinding over rock.

  And when it gave way—abruptly, as if something on the other side had suddenly ripped the stones away in an effortless grip—she fell forward, unable to keep her balance within the tunnel. Rocks, both large and small, crashed down around her in a thunderous cacophony, and curtains of crushed-rock dust descended on her in yellowish folds. She dropped the light, opened her mouth to cry out; a rock struck her elbow, numbing her arm; her chin hit stone, clicking her teeth together and opening a small gash in her upper lip. She had fallen onto a smooth surface, and for a long while she lay and let the echoes of the rockfall thunder around her like marching armies; dust whitened her hair and flesh, and to her it smelled like sweat and blood.

  Before her the flashlight’s beam was splayed across an unbroken stone floor. When she was ready to move again, she crawled to the flashlight, gripped it in a white-knuckled hand, and rose to her feet.