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Hunter set out the next day. He had searched for an answer for years, but now he knew exactly where it was. Little snippets had become to come back, like cut up lines of text that, when finally assembled in the proper order, would make sense. Armed with a rifle and four full clips, he tramped straight across the Coleman property, uncaring if he were spotted. No one hailed him, no warning shots were fired. The disinterested forest was eerily quiet as he stepped into it, the only sound the soft wind flicking through the trees.
The fear -that long ago stone he believed had been eroded away to a chip by years- returned. It was almost as if Jesse was still with him as he pushed into the woods, grown even denser and darker after nearly a decade. He smelled the river ahead of him and his fear doubled. This is where it had started. But he wasn’t ten years old and helpless anymore and he made himself go forward.
The trees were a little taller now and he had to trek further into the woods before he saw it again, but there it was. Hunter stopped and stared, trembling a little, but not turning back.
The goat’s head emerged amidst the treetops, still immense, towering, and unsettling. Its unadorned eyes were dead, cold, and no smoke bloomed from its nostrils. Sunlight reflected dully off of weathered bronze. A stone thrown at it would elicit only a hollow tink. But that it was there, and real, was still terrifying. None of it had been imagination. How could such a thing have never been seen, at least from the air? And were there sentries? Guards to keep its awful secret? Hunter dismissed this almost immediately. Who would be mad enough to come here?
He pushed back the last of the vines and blackberry brambles and broke into a clearing, an unnatural amphitheater of cleared sand some thirty yards across and thirty yards deep. A hundred foot thick stand of trees sprouted at the rear of the clearing in a natural privacy fence, screening the monstrous idol from the river.
Even knowing it would be cold to the touch, and harmless right now, Hunter delayed in approaching the statue. His eye, instead, was drawn to a small wooden building with an unlocked door. The door, in fact, was held closed only by a stub of wood nailed into the jamb which could be turned crosswise to keep the door from springing open. Hunter twisted the piece of wood on its rusty nail and the door creaked open in entreaty.
He stepped into its darkness, unsure sunshine creeping in through the new ingress.
Two wooden shelves braced the rear wall of the building. On each shelf stood a dozen or so containers about two feet high, a foot in width, and shaped more or less like conga drums. Dust coated each container and the opening at the top was covered in some kind of animal skin and secured with twine. On closer scrutiny, Hunter realized the containers were urns. There were no markings on any of the containers, as if it was important to save the urns, but not important enough to identify them. Hunter’s blood felt like icy slush in his veins. His knees trembled and his stomach rolled as he came to the monstrous understanding of what had happened.
This place was a tophet, literally, the “place of roasting”. Marie had told him. There were perhaps thirty urns, each containing the ashes and unburned bone fragments of a child. In one of these drums the uneasy remains of his brother had been callously stowed away. How long had this had been going on. Once a year? Twice a year? He couldn’t bear another second in the building and he backed out into the hushed sunshine.
He turned around and faced the statue, craning his head up to stare into its unseeing eyes. It was just as Marie had described, gloating over him like a demon. The massive bronze idol stood thirty feet tall, the last six feet devoted to the hideous goat head. Piles of ash from untold years had been scooped out and pushed to the side where they formed a seven foot high mound, rounded by years of rain. Hollowed out in the squat body of the thing were seven chambers, the upper chambers obviously accessed by a ramp. The bronze hollows of each chamber had been reddened by heat and blackened by soot. The decades dead smell of burnt blood clung like a nightmare to the inner walls of the chambers. The first chamber was for grain, supplied by Lonnie Maness. The second chamber was for fowl, right in the wheelhouse of Leonard Pitts. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth chambers were for a ram, a ewe, a calf, and a bull. Their infernal gods had rewarded the Colemans well for their many offerings. And what did the lowly Key family -common and impoverished- have to offer? The greatest sacrifice of all: a child for the seventh chamber.
One arm of the idol pointed towards the ground, the other, hinged at the shoulder with rusty joints, pointed towards the sky. Hunter tried to remain clinical in his study of the statue, but he found it hard to keep his gorge down as he realized the upward pointing arm was articulated in such a way as to allow it to lower the offering in its hand into the seventh chamber.
Is that the last thing Jesse saw, he wondered? The flames leaping high in the burning hollow? The eyes of the idol red hot and glowing, smoke jetting like steam from its nostrils? The torpid, rusty creaking of the mechanical arm as it slowly lowered him into the blazing pit while the leading lights of the town chanted and beat drums? Was he conscious? Was he in pain? Did he scream?
It was simply too much to fathom. The world wavered and became liquid. Hunter stumbled backwards and fell hard. His gorge finally found an outlet and he threw up on the unholy ground. It all came back at once, everything that had happened, as if a dam had broken and all the memories washed in on a rampaging torrent, overpowering his senses. It was worse than he could have imagined.
Once he stopped gagging, slow tears filled his eyes and he sat there on the hard ground while the lulling sound of the river underscored the screeing crickets and whistling birds all around him.
Behind him, the statue of Moloch wrapped its shadow around him, its very existence the sum of a world which Hunter had never believed existed.