She didn’t understand what she was holding in her hands. The girl’s father had grabbed the child and scurried off with the other women to clean and care for the newborn, but Valia was left here holding…this. The woman before her had unraveled right in front of her eyes, pulling at parts of herself that Valia couldn’t begin to see. She had never seen anything like it, and though she had been guided by her prophecies for all this time, and even though Henry was born and used as their guiding light, there was something about this Alice that had just been born that escaped her.
She remembered years ago, the dreams she had, a prophecy and guidance from the divine. A child would be born. Not just any child though, a child of great significance, a child that would bring about good for her and her followers. Small at the time of the dream, her spiritual group met in the downstairs den in her home back in Kansas. They would spend each meeting, sometimes three nights a week, going over concepts and texts from great thinkers about the divine nature of the universe. She always came back to her Christian teachings from her upbringing, but she knew Christ would have wanted to learn from the great spiritual leaders throughout the ages. Buddha could teach something, Mohammed. This set her apart from a lot of her peers in her old church, the others citing heresy in their judgment of her, but the small splinter group that met was enthusiastic about synthesizing a global spirituality.
The child in her dream had brought her out to Georgia. Once she had finally decided to leave that no-good husband of hers, she found friends who were also looking for a new place to go, and she followed the signs she was given by what she interpreted as a higher power. The prophetic dreams had shown her forests and roads with signs, and after a bit of digging, she had been able to find where all of those things existed. Some little town just west of Atlanta, tucked into the countryside. When she arrived, the small church from her dreams had been falling apart and its congregation dismantling. She stepped in, offered them salvation, and those that stayed helped her rebuild and repair the church, and the ones that left kept their opinions to themselves, surprising Valia.
In her dream, past the forests and roads, past the church she was shown, a glowing gift of a child arrived and saved them all. In her dream, a voice boomed and told her that the child would bring about change, that it would bring the authenticity they sought to the world. Moving towards the child, she felt warmth radiating off of it, golden mist swirling around it that brought a lightness to her, and the gentle infant brought a peace to her heart. She knew she needed to get to Georgia, she knew she needed to build a paradise for this child, and she knew that she would be an important figure in the changing and evolving world.
Once she had rebuilt the structure of the church, the people arrived, not just from the small town nearby, but from a wide net in the surrounding areas. She watched over the years for pregnant women, for new families, for the possibility of a child being born in their midst. The children came and went, beautiful in their own rights, and she doted on each one as if it was the most beautiful thing in the world. But the children aged without any special influence on the community outside the light that most children bring to a space, despite the meltdowns and tantrums. She knew the child she was looking for was calm and gentle, a child that effortlessly existed and allowed those around them to exist in peace and grace. This child would save them, not challenge them, and this child would guide them, grow them; this child would be their savior.
The dreams continued over the years, popping in occasionally to restore her faith in the child being delivered to her. After a few years, one of her own children moved to the town and joined her church. Tom, her youngest, had met a young woman and wanted his mother’s approval before he married her and started a family of his own. No longer in contact with her ex-husband, Tom had sought his mother out after years of judgment and persecution for leaving his father. Tom hadn’t suffered at the hand of James for as long as she and the other kids had. As James aged, he became calmer and more subdued, at least for his youngest son, sparing the child the abuse his older sisters had faced. The girls refused to talk to their mother for not standing up sooner and protecting them. She had sins in her past, but Valia still felt she had done the best she could at the time. As he grew older, Tom recognized the ways the home had been so harmful to everyone except him and had lightened up on his mom.
The woman he brought with him, a young, golden skinned, red-headed woman that seemed spacey and subdued, was as enjoyable as she was sallow and complacent. She made no waves, and she always seemed to be in a far-off place, something she knew Tom mistook for mystery and a willingness to follow him as he charged through life. She had a mystic quality to her, but Valia worried that she was nothing but air, something ephemeral that would slip away. She felt herself drawn to this woman, a sense of ease and calm always floating around her, but she was hesitant to accept this new woman fully into her life.
Tom and his new bride, Jo, stayed in the town close to Valia after they were married and soon pregnant with their first child. Not her first grandchild, but the only grandchild that Valia might have a chance for a relationship with, she completely forgot about her dreams. Blinded by the joy of reconnecting with her family, a wound in her life she had been deadened to was now aching and alive again, Valia completely lost sight of her prophetic work. Her followers took over more and more of the church, brought in new members, new families and converts, and for a moment, Valia found contentment at home. She still went to the church, still participated in weekly meetings, but she didn’t pour as much of herself into it day in and day out. Jo even began to meet with some of the other young mothers at the church, the newest member and her husband having come to them just the previous week.
Kane’s wife had been the one to bring the couple out to the woods from Atlanta. While she was an enthusiastic member of the church, Kane had been hesitant to fully immerse himself and kept himself to the periphery. Not a spiritual person himself, the young man was brought up in a poor family that lived more from the land and by their wits than disappearing into the fantasy of religion, as he called it. He only entertained his wife’s spiritual leanings because his sense of duty to his wife ran parallel to his admiration and love for her. She was his world, his treasure, and he was willing to put up with her flights of spiritual fancy.
The following spring Valia’s grandson was born, a little golden skinned boy that Jo named Henry after her own grandfather, a seemingly honorable man that had passed a decade before. The little blonde curls plastered to his head played off the beautiful blue of his eyes, giving the child a cherubic quality. As she was rocking him her arms one day, pacing the aisles of pews in the church, the dream suddenly came back to her.
How had she forgotten? How had she been blinded by familial love to her one goal in life: to find this child that would change the world? He had been coming to her this whole time, not through the church but through her own bloodline. She was the grandmother of something magnificent. Henry was important, and by extension, Valia saw her own approach to greatness returning.
Jo was less enthusiastic about this revelation of Valia’s. While Tom had entertained his mother, Jo was less willing to let the old woman idolize her child. Sure, Henry was a beautiful and wonderful baby, but knowing from her own upbringing, giving something a sense of grandeur that it might not have could be disastrous. Or it could at least cost you a martyred hero of a parent. She began to pull away from Valia, and while she was not denying her access to Henry outright, Jo put up walls of protection around her and her child, giving a comfortable space from the obsessed old woman. She could see that it pained Valia, but there was a hunger in Valia’s eyes that scared Jo and made her want to get away.
“I want to go on a trip,” she uncharacteristically declared to Tom one day.
“Where? You just had a baby.”
“I know, but I miss the ocean. I wanna see the beach and the waves.”
“I don’t know, Jo. Maybe let’s give it a couple of months to get more settled.”
A couple of months later, in the wake of another wave of fervor from Valia, she asked again.
“Hey. What about the beach?”
“What about it?”
“I’d like to go. I miss the sounds of the waves. Remember our trips?”
“Jo, I don’t think now is a good time.”
“Why? You’re stressed and worn out. It would be a good reprieve after the busy season you’ve had at work.”
“I guess so. Sure. Maybe the two of us could sneak away, let my mom take care of Henry for a long weekend or something.”
“What? No. Henry comes too! I want to see him experience the beach for the first time.”
Her urgency and insistence took him off guard. Tom had never seen Jo really react or fight for something, but since they had brought Henry into the world, Jo had become defensive and anxious, always looking over her shoulder and imagining some coming persecution.
“Come on,” she softened, “It’ll be fun. We will pack some toys, take lots of pictures. It’ll make me happy.”
“Happy, huh? Okay, but I don’t want to go far. Let’s just drive out to the coast. But quick trip. One night. We can stay the night in Savannah or something.”
“Deal!”
And like that, the three left, leaving Valia to miss her golden baby boy.
Tom returned a few days later to drop off Henry and to go back out to the beach. Jo had gone missing, and despite their best efforts to find her, there was no trace of her. He felt a responsibility to at least figure out what had happened. She supposed she should feel bad, but now she had her grandson to herself, uninterrupted. While Tom was gone, Valia doted on the little Henry, basking in his glory and tending to his every need. In his glow, she felt warm and cared for, gazing into his eyes, she felt peace and grace that she hadn’t felt before. This had to be the child she dreamed of.
Henry was going to transform the world.
But years later, this new baby, Alice, had come out cooing, not crying, and quickly thereafter, her mother had disappeared and become this. A becoming that seemed tortuous, with a finality that shook something deep inside Valia. Henry had been born to be a guiding light in this church, perhaps Alice was a test of what needed to be cleansed. Two children, two mothers gone, one into a pile of smoke, having unraveled herself, the other a mysterious disappearance. Valia grew even more disturbed in the face of this transformation. Since Henry had been born, she hadn’t noticed any other changes in her congregation, no enlightenment, no evolution, but the instant Alice was born, one of her dear followers was essentially destroyed. She came to an extreme conclusion.
“The child is evil. She’s come to undo us all.”
In that moment, Valia resolved that she was going to do something about this child, about this woman who came undone, before anyone else was harmed. Fresh blood from the delivery on her hands or not, she needed to isolate the remains of the mother. Her mind began to orchestrate how she could use them to her advantage. It disturbed her to think, but if she treated the thing as an artifact of the evil that was coming to destroy them, she could use this artifact to build something, to build a united front against an enemy that none of them could see. Evidenced only by the haunted remains of a woman, she could use this moment as a driving force for her divine purpose. While the group of women caring for Kane and Alice started to get smaller, too many hands trying to do the same things, Valia called some of her closest companions to her.
“This is it. From my dream, another prophecy. There would be another child delivered to us, another child that brought change, but this child would be unlike the first one. This child would become a destroyer. Did you hear the voices when her mother started pulling at herself?”
The women stared at her in anxious silence.
“Tell me you heard the voices. The sound of blood in the throat? A woman’s laugh? Am I the only one who hears the voices that are sent to warn us?!”
“You think that warning is about Alice?”
“Look what happened to her mother. You weren’t close enough, but the pain in that woman’s eyes. Something was done to her that was not the beautiful transformation we are looking for. She was not delivered into some holy place.
“We need to do something with this,” Valia gestured towards the pile of thread, the smoky smell beginning to dissipate, “and then we need to do something about the child.”
“What do you mean we need to do something about the child? She is a child.”
“She’s evil. Valia is right.”
“Did you see what happened to her mother?’ another congregant asked, fervor building in her voice.
“Yes, but that may have had nothing to do with that baby. For all we know there was something wrong with her mother.”
“And here we are. You’re covered in her blood. What if it comes for us?!”
“Comes for us? Please. Relax. You are jumping too far ahead.”
The woman was not so easily caught up in the mentality of the others, Valia noted, probably because she was pregnant herself.
“There’s nothing wrong with you or your baby. I had a dream about a singular child, a test, not multiple children come to destroy their mothers.”
“But Valia, what are you planning to do to this child?”
“I’m not sure. Y’all go keep the dad occupied, and I am going to go lock this away. It will need to be cleansed of its harmful energies, and I just might be the only one strong enough to do it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Look! She’s covered in the blood and nothing’s happening. Maybe she’s protected.”
“Protected?” the skeptical woman asked.
“God give you strength and courage,” another of the women said softly, unwilling to lay hands on Valia.
The pregnant woman still seemed uneasy about this plan. Valia could tell when someone wasn’t all in, when faith was slipping, and this woman hadn’t been all in, ever. The best thing to do would be remove her before she became another blockade to overcome.
“Holly. I need you to go home. Go rest and pray and be with family.”
Uneasily, Holly stood, and for a brief moment looked as if she was about to say something, offer some argument about the issue at hand, but then she resigned herself to just leaving and washing her hands of the ordeal. She hoped that they wouldn’t do anything crazy with baby Alice, but she was in no position to fight off the whole group of women around Kane to get him alone to tell him. She walked out of the main room of the church towards her car. Before she left, she tried catching Kane’s eyes to no avail.
“I hope that one isn’t going to be a problem.”
The other women turned to Valia and nodded solemnly in agreement. Though the women didn’t quite understand the stance that Valia was taking, they did understand the power dynamics of the church and the ways in which they could be punished indirectly for going against her wishes and orders. Valia had grown in power over the years, so the women, despite having more pull in the past, were unable to do anything about it now. The congregation and other church leaders were all under her sway, so the easiest thing to do was go along as much as possible, keeping their hands out of particularly sticky situations if they could.
Kane was with the little baby, distracted by the attention of the others around him, and Valia was able to gather the thread in her arms and secret it away to the back office. She had made a space underneath her desk that she had been squirreling away syphoned funds and other items she would need in case anything ever turned south on her. She had learned from her ex-husband that not having a safety net and an escape plan would keep you trapped and abused, unable to avoid whatever hell was raining down on you. She slid the desk chair back, lifted the rug, and loosened the sliding panel she had installed in lieu of a floorboard. It had been complicated to make and had taken her a couple of tries to get it right, but it was now secure and discreet.
The empty space beneath her desk was organized haphazardly, something she had always been guilty of, and she had to take a moment to slide things to the side and condense them to make room for the relic. She dug a bag out of her desk drawer and shoved the smoky thread inside, bound it tightly, and slid it into the back of the little alcove. After replacing the flooring, the rug, and the desk, Valia quietly made her way back into the main hall where the crowd had congregated around Kane and the baby. She needed to find a way to separate them, to enlist some plan to subdue Kane and free herself and the world of this baby. The man had bundled the little girl up and was standing to leave when Valia intercepted him.
“Where are you going?”
“To the hospital.”
“Why, is there something wrong?”
“No, I don’t think so, but she was just born, and while my wife had a plan for her to be born here, I would like to get her looked at to be sure everything is okay.”
“We have a doctor in the congregation. He can be here in twenty minutes. But everyone here can help, we all know what to do with a baby. Better than you, I might say.”
“That may be in some ways, but I believe in doctors more than I believe in God, and I believe in our doctor more than yours.”
This left Valia stunned for a moment, her blinking indicating that she was taken aback and couldn’t necessarily process what the man had just said to him. It would make sense that he would be the poison in the little girl, the one who had corrupted his wife into whatever this was. His wife had been so devout, such a woman of God, and a loyal member of her congregation that it surprised her that she could be married to a man like Kane once she had gotten to know him.
“But the congregation has plenty of—”
“Valia. I am taking my child to the hospital to have her checked out. I will come back after and deal with whatever happened before with the…,” he trailed off, gesturing towards the dais.
“But Kane—”
“No. Valia. No buts. Move.”
The man puffed up in front of her and held his cooing child close to his chest. While she had promised herself that she would never be intimidated by a man again, it was easier to back down, something inside of her shrinking away from the threat. She stepped to the side, her glances cast downward as the man slid past and out the front doors.
“Clean up this mess,” Valia shouted at the group of women staring at her, waiting for her next move.
The sharp shout echoed through the silent hall, and a couple of the women jumped at the startling command. Embarrassed and ashamed for how she reacted to Kane, Valia stomped back into her office and slammed the doors, while the women hurried about the room, cleaning up the mess and debris. She slumped into her desk chair and covered her face with her hands and groaned. She needed to get rid that child. She needed to get rid of them both, but she also knew she would catch more flies with honey than vinegar. It might take her a while, but she could win his trust, could keep him close to her, and keep Alice close as well. Valia placed her hands on the desk and resolved herself to create a plan: center Alice in their devotion, false though it may be, and watch for signs of the little girl corrupting. Then, and only then, would she be able to rally the congregation around her and move them to action. In the meantime, she would plot and plan and keep Kane docile and bolster Henry up to stand against this force of darkness.
The smell of smoke wafted from under the floorboards, so Valia pulled a scented candle out from her desk and lit it, the scent of cinnamon apple commanding the room. In the glow of the flame, the lights low around her, Valia’s face seemed to shift rapidly through expressions. Any outsider would have intervened with Valia, had the woman not been such a terrifying force to others, but as is so often true, many capable of horrors are left unchecked, even by themselves. Valia was no exception, and as she furiously worked on this long game with Kane and Alice, she couldn’t recognize her swift slide into madness. All she could feel was the sensations of hands on her shoulders, holding her down, calming her for what would come next.