"Now hurry on, boys," she directed briskly in a voice that sounded unnaturally furtive and low. "Buddy, you get in here between Lem and I—there—that's it. Now, boys, we are going to say a little prayer for pap and maw, and you, Lem, remember."
At a slight sound the three impulsively and unconsciously took hold of each other and turned blanched faces toward the window opposite the altar. At the same instant, a screech-owl closed his wings on the window casement and sat immobile, like a creature without life, while a slender, livid finger of moonlight crossed its speckled back and, continuing on, pointed specifically to the bloody cross athwart the altar.
Little Bud faltered weakly and shook like a boy with the ague. His lips worked mutely and tried to whisper something, but his tongue cleft, paralyzed with a prickly dread that stole over him, and his teeth began a forbidding tattoo. He cast an appealing look at Lem; wherefore the mere sight of Lem's white face accentuated his own fleeting courage. The grim lethargy of this subtle, contagious dread had communicated its blight to Lem's senses with equal virulence.
A pall of lethal fear deprived Belle-Ann of words and action. What with the awful thick dark, made pitchy beyond the buff circle of the flickering lantern; a fetid, curdy, musty, stifling blackness which, she now felt instinctively, held screened just there, some hidden horror reaching out to wrap its smothering terror about her.
The fan-like hiss of the hybrid bats that blundered aloft, their vicious unearthly squeaks, stabbing the dead stillness, added to her cryptic dread. Upon a sudden current of vagrant air a handful of fire-flies were driven through one of the sundered windows, whereupon they bobbed and swayed about evilly against the haunting gloom of the church like ghastly corpse candles. Together with the unblinking stare of the screech-owl from the moon-touched window casement, all these menacing influences combined and laid hold of Belle-Ann's will like overpowering hands of living agencies crowding her remorselessly to the verge of panic.
She stood rigid, listening with a natant, sickening consciousness that something terrible hung at her back. Then, ashamed of her exposition of timid indecision and fear, she valiantly strove to disguise with action the sudden racking shudder that compassed and rippled over her being, like the chill of an icy current.
Belle-Ann summoned all her failing faculties and levied upon her will to proceed with the ceremony of the sacred mission that had led them to this Godless place. But she only stood fixedly, rigid and helpless, growing paler with each succeeding moment, and gazed blankly at Bud and Lem alternately. Their nerves were as yielding as jelly strings. Other than the silky rustle aloft, punctuated occasionally with the thin needle-like anathemas of the bull-bats, there was now not the slightest sound within to disrupt the death-hush of this place. Nevertheless, Lem craned his neck, edging closer to the other two, and whispered portentously:
"Ded yo'-all heer anything?"
"No," returned Belle-Ann faintly and uncertainly.
Buddy could only shake his head. Then sharply and, oddly enough, in unison, impelled by a sudden common instinct, the trio wheeled about, facing the wrecked benches. What they saw in that instant congealed the warm flow in their veins to currents of ice and drove their very breaths away.